Class 
Book 




ff45g ^ 



3& 



OopigiitN . 



\1%3 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



/ 

IReafciitQs for Stubents. 



fH^H 



JOAN OF ARC 
THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH 



BY 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 



EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

BY 

J. M. HART 




itm 



^y 



NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

i*93 



N 






Copyright, 1893, 



HENRY HOLT & CO. 



ll-lliX3L 



• ' • 



THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, 
RAHWAY, N. J. 



PREFACE. 



This volume of selections is not to be regarded as 
a contribution to the study of English literature in 
general, or of De Quincey in particular. Its aim is 
more modest : on the one hand, to interest the student 
and thereby engage him to make further acquaintance 
with the author for himself; on the other, to guide 
him to a better appreciation of prose style. 

The very brief statement of the salient points in 
De Quincey's life and character will be found adequate, 
I trust, for general needs. Whoever wishes to go 
more deeply into the subject must consult the works 
cited at p. v. I take the liberty of doubting whether 
we shall ever get the facts of De Quincey's life more 
precisely or much more fully than we now have them. 
His innate shyness, intensified by the opium habit 
with its attendant vagrancy, has succeeded in envelop- 
ing most of the details in an atmosphere of mystery. 

The remarks upon De Quincey's style are to be 
used in connection with Professor Minto's treatise. 
His treatment of the subject is too condensed to be 
abridged, and too good to be merely pillaged. 

In the matter of annotation I have been as sparing 
as possible. For explanations of words and phrases 
the new International Webster is the standard of 



IV PREFACE. 

reference. What is correctly and adequately given 
there is not uselessly repeated here. In like manner 
historical and literary allusions that can be traced in 
the usual books of English history and encyclopedias 
are passed over. Why should an editor tell his 
reader what the reader can readily discover with a 
little effort ? But there are allusions which demand 
special knowledge. These I have tried to elucidate 
fully enough to bring out the point of De Quincey's 
wording. Some, I admit, have baffled my best efforts. 
For instance, I am unable to trace the fawns and stag, 
p. 15 : 27, 29, or the female saint in armor, 38 : 10. 
Perhaps in a subsequent edition I may have better 
success. 

J. M. Hart. 
Cornell University, August 1, 1893. 



INTRODUCTION. 



He came, the bard, a little Druid wight 
Of withered aspect ; but his eye was keen, 
With sweetness mixed. In russet brown bedight, 
As is his sister of the copses green, 
He crept along, unpromising of mien. 
Gross he who judges so ! His soul was fair, 
Bright as the children of yon azure sheen. 
True comeliness, which nothing can impair, 
Dwells in the mind : all else is vanity and glare. 

— Thomson's Castle of Indolence. 

[Quoted by Mr. Shadworth Hodgson as an exact prophetic 
description of De Quincey's appearance.] 

LIFE OF DE QUINCEY.* 

Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester, August 
15, 1785. He was the fifth child and second son in a family 
of eight children. His infancy was passed in his father's 
residence called The Farm, then suburban but now absorbed 
in the " brick and uproar " of the great city. In 1791 or 1792 
the family removed to Greenhay, which is now also within 
the limits of Manchester. The father, Thomas De Quincey, 
was a prosperous trader, having extensive transactions with 
Portugal, the West Indies, and America. He was a man of 

* For further particulars consult : H. A. Page, Thomas De Quincey, 
His Life and Writings, 2 vols., London, 1877 ; second ed., 1879 
(Page is a pseudonym for Alexander Hay Japp) ; David Masson, De 
Quincey (in English Men of Letters Series); Encyclopedia Britannica ; 
Dictionary of National Biography. The latest materials, viz., Un- 
collected Writings, ed. Hogg ; Posthumous Works, ed. Japp ; 
Memorials, ed. Japp, are out of reach of the ordinary reader. 



VI IN TROD UC TION. 

literary taste and ability. The mother, a Miss Penson, was 
— in the discriminating language of her son — " still more 
highly gifted ; for though unpretending to the name and 
honors of a literary woman, I shall presume to call her 
(what many literary women are not) an intellectual woman." 

Beyond accumulating a good family library and a com- 
fortable estate, the father did nothing for the development 
of his son's gifts. During the son's infancy he was absent 
from Manchester, in Madeira, Lisbon, or the West Indies, 
partly on business, chiefly in the vain quest of health ; his 
trouble being pulmonary consumption. In 1792 he came 
home only to die. 

From 1792 to 1796 the widow remained with her children 
at Greenhay. Young Thomas's education was in charge of 
the Rev. Samuel Hall, curate in Salford, two miles dis- 
tant from Greenhay. The clergyman grounded his pupil 
well in Latin and the rudiments of Greek, and also in 
Biblical lore. The boy's favorite reading at this time was in 
Johnson, Cowper, and the Arabian Nights. But there came 
a disturbing element in the person of the elder brother, 
William, a robust lad, twelve years of age, that is, five years 
older than Thomas. William had been with his father in 
Lisbon and later at the grammar school of Louth. The 
two boys were in marked contrast. The elder was physi- 
cally precocious, strong, and daring; " his genius for mis- 
chief amounted to inspiration," to repeat our De Quincey's 
words. The younger was small and slight, even for his 
years, timid physically, shy, introspective. For nearly four 
years Thomas was the victim of a reign of terror, of which 
he has left the most amusing account in his Autobiographic 
Sketches. In his sixteenth year William, who had shown 
a talent for drawing, was entered as a pupil in the studio of 
Loutherbourg, a distinguished London landscape painter; 
but soon afterward he died of typhus fever. 

In 1796 Mrs. De Ouincey sold Greenhay and removed to 
Bath. Thomas entered the grammar school here, remaining 
as a pupil over two years, and acquiring a high reputation 



INTRODUCTION. Vll 

for proficiency in the classics. Being accidentally injured, 
he was removed and sent for a year to a private school at 
Winkfield. In the summer of 1800 he accepted the invita- 
tion of Lord Westport, a boy somewhat younger than him- 
self whose acquaintance he had made at Bath in 1799, to join 
him in a holiday tour. The two boys, in charge of -Lord 
Westport's tutor, visited Eton and Windsor Castle, (where 
they were presented to the king and queen), London, Wales, 
and Ireland. On the canal boat from Dublin to Tullamore 
they met the Countess of Errol and her sister, the beautiful 
Miss Blake, "and talked about the English poets for the 
whole afternoon." The impression made by the Irish 
beauty upon the intellectually precocious boy was profound ; 
" from this day I was an altered creature, never again re- 
lapsing into the careless irreflective mind of childhood." 

No less picturesque is the situation a few months later. In 
October of the same year, on his return from Ireland, he was 
sent to Laxton, Northamptonshire, to visit Lord and Lady 
Carbery. The latter, as Miss Watson, a handsome heiress, 
had been an intimate friend of Mrs. De Ouincey. She was at 
this time twenty-six. She appears to have been kindness 
itself to the boy ten years her junior, training him in the ways 
of the elegant world. On the other hand, being a woman 
of deep religious principles, a follower of the Evangelical 
School, she got her learned young protege to initiate her in 
the mysteries of Greek, that she might understand the New 
Testament in the original. One wonders why no English 
artist has yet bethought him of painting the stately young 
matron and her boy teacher holding their amiable morning 
lesson. 

We may linger here over two facts significant for De 
Quincey's entire future life. With Miss Blake he " talked 
about the English poets for the whole afternoon." The pas- 
sage is taken from De Quincey's letter to his mother, dated 
Westport, Ireland, August 20, 1800. The boy writer was 
to become, not many years later, the associate of Words- 
worth and Coleridge, the expounder of the new school, the 



Vin INTRODUCTION. 

lifelong defender of all good English poetry. Despite his 
signal classic attainments — he is said to have spoken Greek 
fluently at the age of fifteen — De Quincey's heart, from first 
to last, was with his beloved countrymen. His view of the 
Greek spirit and style is not perfectly just. The other fact 
is his early acquaintance with the wealthy and high-born. 
He never knew what it was to be rich, or even to be famous, 
in the ordinary sense. More than once in after years he felt 
the pinch of want, although more through his own careless- 
ness and ignorance of business ways than from actual need. 
His life, whether in city or in country, was passed in isola- 
tion. Yet his writings are permeated with the aroma of 
aristocracy. One feels that the writer is in touch at least 
with the rulers of the world. Yet his aristocratic bias does 
not prevent him at times from sharing the feelings and even 
understanding the prejudices of the other classes. For evi- 
dence of this one need only read his humorous description of 
the coachman, Fanny's grandfather, or, better still, that of 
the one-eyed Cyclops Diphrelates in the Vision of Sudden 
Death, or the meeting with the mother and her two daugh- 
ters, pp. jy, 78, in contrast with the middle-aged mother, 
pp. 81, 82. In fact, the whole of Joan of Arc is nobly demo- 
cratic. Of all the great authors upon this subject De 
Quincey is the only one that has thoroughly entered into 
and firmly maintained Joan's true peasant nature in its 
rugged simplicity and dignity. Others make her either a 
blatant Amazon or a love-sick Semiramis. 

By the end of 1800 De Quincey was a pupil in the Man- 
chester grammar school. The stay here became intoler- 
able to him. He complained that he could not stir out of 
doors without being " nosed by a factory, a cotton-bag, a 
cotton dealer, or something else allied to that detestable 
commerce." His school tasks were too mechanical and 
petty. After remonstrating in vain to his mother, he bor- 
rowed some money from Lady Carbery, who was ignorant 
of his intent, and — like many a schoolboy before and since 
—?-an away. It was on a July morning, 1802. He walked 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

the forty miles from Manchester to Chester, where his mother 
was then living. Fortunately for him, there was with her at 
the time her brother, Colonel Penson, an East Indian officer 
home on a furlough. The colonel, as a man of the world, 
saw nothing extraordinary in a bright boy of seventeen 
wearying of school life, and humored his vagrant nephew. 
It was arranged that the boy should have an allowance of 
a guinea a week, and roam at will for the summer. 

From July to November, 1802, he wandered about through 
North Wales, alternately lodging in an expensive inn and 
sharing the ridiculously cheap food and shelter of some 
Welsh rustic. Occasionally, even, he slept on the ground in 
the open fields. At last, even this gypsy life failed to satisfy 
him. In November he took the sudden resolve to essay the 
world of London. His idea, it cannot be called a plan, was 
to raise two hundred pounds from some money lender, on 
which sum he might maintain himself for four years, until he 
attained his majority, and could legally claim the annual 
^allowance of one hundred and fifty pounds settled upon him 
by his father's will. The six months of his London life are 
still a puzzle to the biographer. Although De Quincey treats 
of them at length, and with singular force of language, in 
his memorable Confessions, he gives very few facts. All 
we know is that he led a life of desperate poverty, that his 
companions were the " peripatetics " of Oxford Street, the 
fallen women, who seem to have been fascinated by his innate 
goodness and refinement. One in particular, poor Ann, 
stands out as the good Samaritan to one even more destitute 
than herself. Whoever wishes to know the sad story, so far 
as it can be known, must read it in De Quincey 's own words. 
To attempt to restate or to abridge it would be fatuous ; the 
book of Confessions is an English classic. 

About the middle of 1803 De Quincey was discovered and 
reclaimed by his family ; in what way, we are not informed. 
He was sent to Worcester College, Oxford, on an allowance 
of one hundred pounds a year. Of the details of his Oxford 
life very little is known. He became remarkable for his 



X INTRODUCTION. 

range of information and his powers of conversation, but 
otherwise he attracted little attention. With the aid of a 
German acquaintance, Schwarzburg, he mastered that lan- 
guage well enough to make a serious study of its literature 
and philosophy. It was here, also, that he completed a sys- 
tematic study of English literature, going back as far as 
Chaucer. He entered into correspondence with Words- 
worth. Coleridge, for whom he had also a profound admira- 
tion, had gone to Malta in 1805. Last, but not least, it was 
at Oxford that De Quincey began the use of opium, that 
infirmity which is inseparably associated with his name. 

The exact date of his leaving Oxford is not known. It 
was probably in 1807 or 1808, although his name remained 
on the college books until 1810. He passed with distinction 
part of the written examination for B. A., but did not offer 
himself for the oral, and therefore did not receive the degree. 
He made frequent visits to London, associating there with 
various men of letters. 

In 1806 De Quincey came of age. From this time on 
for upward of ten years he appears to be in easy circum- 
stances. In 1807 he met Coleridge at Bridgewater and was 
carried away by his marvelous flow of thought and speech. 
A few weeks later De Quincey escorted Mrs. Coleridge and 
her three little children to the Lake country, Coleridge being 
busy with his arrangements for lectures in London. De 
Quincey, in his capacity of escort, enjoyed the privilege and 
happiness of passing two days in Wordsworth's cottage at 
Grasmere, in the society of the poet himself, his wife, and 
his sister Dorothy. A few days later he met Southey at 
Keswick Hall, where Mrs. Coleridge was to remain ; she 
and Mrs. Southey were sisters. 

The greater part of 1808 and 1809 De Quincey passed in 
London. In November, 1809, he took possession of Words- 
worth's former cottage, Townsend, Grasmere. For twenty- 
seven years he was to be its owner. For twenty of these 
years it was to be his home or, at least, his headquarters. 
From 1809 to 1816 he remained a bachelor, reveling in his 



IN TROD UC TIOA T . XI 

seclusion and his library (by 1816 he had accumulated five 
thousand volumes), and yielding more and more to the 
terrible opium. After Wordsworth and Southey, and 
Coleridge, who was frequently in the Lake country in 1810, 
De Quincey's most notable friend was young John Wilson, 
known subsequently as Professor Wilson of Edinburgh, the 
" Christopher North " of the Nodes Ambrosiance. De 
Quincey and North were a singular pair. The former 
undersized, timid, gentle of voice; the latter, a youthful 
Hercules, the hero of Oxford athletics and winner of prizes 
in the classics. Yet they became and ever remained firm 
friends. It is to be noted that De Quincey, although slight 
of frame, was always a good walker and had no difficulty in 
keeping up with Wilson in their numerous all-day fishing 
excursions. Wilson's home was in Edinburgh, where 
De Quincey visited him in 1814, making the acquaintance of 
the younger set of Scotch literary notabilities. 

In 1816 De Quincey married Margaret Simpson, the 
daughter of a Westmoreland " statesman " living near Gras- 
mere. " Statesman," in this sense, has been defined by 
De Quincey's daughter as a farmer whose family had 
farmed the same land for generations, the tenure being by 
special service. Mrs. De Quincey was eighteen at marriage. 
She was attractive in appearance, amiable in manners, a faith- 
ful wife, well educated, and sufficiently informed to appre- 
ciate and sympathize with her husband's remarkable gifts. 
De Quincey's description of the happy days of their early 
wedded life is in his best vein, and should be read by the 
side of Carlyle's account of Craigenputtock in his letter to 
his brother, Dr. Carlyle.* In the year before and the first 
year after marriage, De Quincey made strenuous efforts to 
shake off the opium habit. But he speedily relapsed, until 
in 1819 he was at his worst. The maximum dose, if we may 
trust his statement, was twelve thousand drops of laudanum, 
or about ten wineglassfuls. This is scarcely credible. In 

* November 26, 1828. In Letters of Thomas Carlyle, ed. C. E. 
Norton, 1889, p. 129. 



xii IN TROD UCTION 

1 8 19 he made a second and fairly successful effort to 
reform. His resources, through carelessness and un- 
fortunate investments, had become seriously impaired, 
and he was confronted with the possibility of poverty. 
He emerged from the crisis with a shattered frame and 
nerves unstrung, but at all events the demon, if not act- 
ually slain, had been subdued. Thenceforth De Quincey 
was only a moderate opium taker, with an occasional 
excess. 

In 1819 his friends procured for him the editorship of the 
Westmorela?id Gazette, started in 181 8 as the local organ of 
the Tory party. He held the office for a little over a year. 
His editorship can scarcely be called successful, for De Quin- 
cey was not the man to embody practical views upon practical 
current matters. But it had one all-important result : it 
habituated De Quincey to seeing himself in print, it gave 
him "a liking for the sight of printer's proofs." Up to this 
time, although the most indefatigable reader of other men's 
writings, he himself had written nothing. He had been a 
consumer, not a producer. From this time on he was to be 
not only one of the most conspicuous writers, but even one 
of the most prolific. 

De Quincey 's first appearance as a magazine writer was 
in the London Magazine, then at the height of its fame. 
Among its contributors were Lamb (" Elia"), Hazlitt, Allan 
Cunningham, Procter ("Barry Cornwall"), and Thomas 
Hood. In the London Magazine for September, 1821, 
appeared the first part, in October the second part of the 
Confessions of an Opium. Eater. About a year later the 
publishers of the magazine brought out a separate volume 
of Confessions, including a so-called third part. 

In 1823 and 1824 articles from De Quincey 's pen came 
fast. Especially noteworthy are Walking Stewart, 0?i the 
Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, Analects fro7n Jean Paul 
Richter, Goethe. The latter article was a sharp attack both 
on Goethe himself and on Carlyle as translator of his Wit- 
he I m I\ leister. 



INTRODUCTION. X1U 

In November, 1826, in Blackwood's Magazine, appeared 
Lessings Laocoon, Translated with Notes ; in February, 
1827, the Last Days of Immannel Kant and On Murder 
Considered as one of the Fine Arts. 

From 1 82 1 to 1830 De Ouincey had still nominally his 
home at Grasmere. But much if not most of the time he 
was either in London or in Edinburgh, leading the life of a 
city recluse, seeing only occasionally an intimate friend like 
Lamb, or Charles Knight, or Wilson. In 1830 he removed 
himself and family to Edinburgh. Henceforth the great 
English writer is permanently identified with the Scotch 
capital. But although in Edinburgh he was not of it ; he 
did not form an appreciable element of its society, as did 
Wilson, Jeffrey, Sir William Hamilton, Brewster, and so 
many others. The shyness, the aloofness, born in him and 
confirmed by his terrible youthful vagrancy in London in 
1803, grew from year to year until in the latter part of his 
life only his most intimate friends could get an interview 
without recourse to some stratagem. His habits of life grew 
more and more eccentric. Although exact data are want- 
ing, we know that he frequently, if not usually, had lodgings 
away from his family, sometimes even two or three different 
lodgings of his own. Like the Arab, he was incessantly 
shifting his tent. Yet he was sincerely attached to his family, 
and was beloved by them in turn. He took much pride in 
educating his children, and was the gentlest and most indul- 
gent of fathers. Indeed, aloofness and gentleness seem to 
have been the dominant traits in De Ouincey's character. 
In 1833 his youngest son died; in 1835 his eldest, William, 
in his eighteenth year, a youth of great promise, or, in the 
father's own words— " my firstborn child, the crown and 
glory of my life." And in 1837 died his wife. Delicate 
health, the care of a large family, and the still greater care 
of a man of genius, loving and attractive in many ways, it is 
true, but a hopeless burden of responsibility, were too much 
for one not of the toughest fiber. The recollection of her 
survives as of a gracious and beautiful woman. Her 



XIV INTRODUCTION. 

practical good sense and sweet temper she fortunately trans- 
mitted to her children. 

After two or three years of uncertainty, the children took 
the management of affairs in their own hands. The eldest 
daughter, Margaret, and the eldest son, Horace, formed the 
plan of removing with the others to Lasswade, seven miles 
out of Edinburgh, leaving the father to come and go at will. 
The plan appears to have worked well. For nine years 
Lasswade was the De Ouincey home, while the father occu- 
pied one set of lodgings after another in town, visiting his 
children frequently but fitfully. One of his practices is too 
amusing and characteristic to be omitted, even in the brief- 
est narrative. He accumulated books and papers so rapidly 
as to make his room uninhabitable. When thus " snowed 
up," he would move into fresh quarters, perhaps in another 
house, to begin the process all over again, but retaining and 
paying rent for the former room. It is known that in this 
way he was at one time chargeable for at least four sepa- 
rate sets of lodgings at once. When, in 1850, or somewhat 
later, De Ouincey undertook to bring out a collected edition 
of his works, the chief labor of his publisher, Mr. Hogg, a 
shrewd and persevering man of business, was to work out, 
almost after the manner of a detective, the traces of De 
Quincey's endless haunts, and gather together precious man- 
uscripts scattered over Edinburgh, and even as far as Glasgow. 
The following is quoted from Masson's Life, chapter x ; it 
reveals the man : " Once, in a hotel in High Street, into 
which he [Mr. Hogg] had taken De Quincey for refuge and 
a basin of soup during a thunder shower, the waiter, after 
looking at De Quincey, said : ' I think, sir, I have a bundle of 
papers which you left here some time ago,' and sure enough, 
a bundle was produced which De Quincey had left there 
about a year before. Another time, having gone to Glasgow 
once more on a visit to Professor Lushington, and having 
taken two tea.chests of papers with him, he had been obliged, 
by some refractoriness on the part of the porter, to leave 
them at a bookseller's shop on their way to the professor's 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

house. This he remembered perfectly; but, as he taken no 
note of the bookseller, or the number of the shop, or even of 
the name of the street, Mr. Hogg found him quite rueful on 
the subject after his return to Edinburgh. A letter to a friend 
and a round of inquiries among the Glasgow booksellers made 
all right, and Mr. Hogg had the pleasure of pointing out to 
him the two recovered boxes as they lay in his office." 

One of his daughters has given us this glimpse of the father 
at Lasswade of an evening : " The newspaper was brought 
out, and he, telling in his own delightful way, rather than 
reading the news, would, on questions from this one or that 
of the party, often including young friends of his children, 
neighbors, or visitors from distant places, illuminate the sub- 
ject with such a wealth of memories, of old stories, of past 
or present experiences, of humor, of suggestion, even of 
prophecy, as by its very wealth makes it impossible to give 
any taste of it." And she adds this touch : " He was not 
a reassuring man for nervous people to live with, as those 
nights were exceptions on which he did not set something 
on fire, the commonest incident being for some one to look 
up from book or work to say casually, ' Papa, your hair 
is on fire ; ' of which a calm 'Is it, my love? 'and a hand 
rubbing out the blaze was all the notice taken " {Mas- 
son, chapter ix). 

During the years from 1840 to 1849 De Quincey's contri- 
butions to Blackwood's Magazine and to Tait's were 
numerous. Noteworthy are Plato's Republic, Homer and 
the Homerida, Suspiria de Profundis, The English Mail 
Coach, Wordsworth's Poetry, Joan of Arc. In 1844 ap- 
peared also his Logic of Political Economy in book form. 

With the year 1849 De Quincey's productivity was practi- 
cally at an end. He wrote, it is true, an occasional short 
paper, but in the main his remnant of life and activity was 
consumed in the not easy task of bringing his scattered pro- 
ductions into one collected edition. The credit of planning 
this edition, and keeping the author's flagging energy up 
to the task, is due to the Edinburgh publisher, Mr. Hogg. 



xvi INTRODUCTION. 

The first volume appeared in 1853, the fourteenth and last 
in i860, the year after De Ouincey's death. Parallel with the 
Edinburgh edition appeared the Ticknor & Fields collec- 
tion, 1851-55, originally in eleven volumes, subsequently 
expanded to twenty. This is still the one most familiar to 
Americans. It contained several articles omitted from 
or condensed in the Edinburgh ; on the other hand the 
Edinburgh had the advantage of the author's revision 
and annotation. In 1861 the Edinburgh became the prop- 
erty of the Blacks, who reissued it in 1862, with a fif- 
teenth volume, containing the biographies written by De 
Quincey for the Encyclopedia Britannica. The new Edin- 
burgh, published by the Blacks in 1889-90, in fourteen 
volumes, is greatly superior to all its predecessors. It has 
been carefully revised by the well-known De Quincey scholar, 
Professor Masson, who has supplied much additional matter, 
partly from De Quincey, partly from his own researches. 
Although not quite an edition definitive, it meets all practical 
wants. The arrangement of contents has been improved, 
and it has the great merit of being cheap and even procura- 
ble in separate volumes. 

In 1853 De Ouincey's eldest daughter, Margaret, was 
married to Mr. Robert Craig, and removed with her husband 
to Ireland. In 1855 the second daughter, Florence, was 
married to Colonel Baird Smith, of the East India Engineers. 
In 1857 De Quincey, then in his seventy-third year, visited 
his daughter and her two little children in Ireland. The last 
great public event to arouse his interest was the East Indian 
mutiny of 1857-58, in the suppression of which his son, Paul 
Frederick, and his son-in-law, Colonel Smith, had a share. 

On December 8, 1859, he died in Edinburgh, attended by 
his unmarried daughter Emily and by Mrs. Craig, hastily 
summoned from Ireland. 

POSITION IN LITERATURE. 

De Quincey is the English essayist by eminence. He pro- 
duced only two books : Logic of Political Economy, 1 844, 



INTRODUCTIOX. XV ll 

and Klosterheim, or the Masque, 1832, both reprinted in the 
new Edinburgh edition. In this respect he differs from his 
great contemporaries, Macaulay and Carlyle. 

The first feature to strike the reader of De Ouincey is his 
immense range of subject and the multifariousness of his 
knowledge. Even the best read student finds it difficult to 
keep pace with his divagations. This accumulation of liter- 
ary material is not mere pedantry ; it is the result of unusual 
inquisitiveness and a tenacious memory, quickened by keen 
observation of life and character. Like Macaulay, whose 
memory was still more prodigious, De Quincey trusted too 
much to his recollections of what he had read ; he did not 
always take the pains to verify by consulting authorities. 
One or two instances of inaccuracy are pointed out in the 
Notes to this volume. In his biography of Shakspere he 
writes : " he [Milton] speaks of him [Shakspere] in his // 
Penseroso as the tutelary genius of the English stage." The 
lines in question are in L 'Allegro, and do not bear out the 
assertion. But such blemishes are rare. 

Furthermore, De Ouincey was endowed with an independ- 
ent and subtle intellect. To repeat Goldsmith's remark 
upon Burke, " he winds into a subject like a serpent." He 
does not rush at it dogmatically, like Johnson, or Carlyle, or 
Macaulay, but reaches the heart of the question only upon 
slowly converging lines. An impatient reader is tempted at 
first to regard him as prolix or digressive, until, reaching the 
conclusion, he discovers that the whole is a series of inevita- 
ble logical steps. The papers in the present volume, being 
mainly narrative and descriptive, do not illustrate De Ouin- 
cey 's method as forcibly as do his analytic and argumenta- 
tive writings. 

The dominant trait in his character is aesthetic intellect- 
uality. He is not a man of practical life, like Macaulay ; 
neither is he a prophet-teacher with a message, like Carlyle. 
He views the issues of life as questions to be studied by the 
intellect. But in him the intellect has for its constant com- 
panions imagination and sympathy. On the one hand, his 



xviil INTRODUCTION. 

imagination, like Burke's, transfigures the framework of his 
thought with a radiant atmosphere of figurative illustration. 
Simile, Comparison, Metaphor, Personification, Apostrophe, 
the whole domain of figurative speech, is at his beck ; and 
the figures seem to come spontaneously, instinctively ; the 
writer seems to be without any conscious rhetorical intent. 
Yet this is only the writer's art concealing itself; of all 
English prose writers De Quincey is the one who has 
blended most skillfully practice and theory. The impres- 
sion made upon the reader's mind is vivid, the truth is not 
merely stated but enforced. On the other hand, De Ouincey's 
sympathy is no less active. He identifies himself with all 
that is noble in life. Especially does he interest himself in 
those whom the world has despised, neglected, or mis- 
understood. He makes it his business to recall to our 
notice men and women whom otherwise we might forget. 
And this sympathy is so intense as to raise him at times 
to the highest pathos. A notable instance is the paper on 
Joan of Arc, unsurpassed in our prose literature. 

From the pathetic to the sublime is but a step. Yet it is 
a step rarely taken. How De Quincey took it may be 
learned, partially at least, from the Dream-Fugue, in the 
present volume. Better still, from the Confessions and the 
Suspiria de Profundis. Here De Quincey, after the manner 
of the Hebrew prophets, leaving behind him the mere facts 
of existence, or using them only as a text, gives himself up 
to musing on the eternal problems of life and death, human 
character and the soul, the finite in contrast with the 
infinite. 

Although he is not among our professed humorists, there 
is a vein of humor running through all his work except that 
of the order sublime. Even the pathos of Joan is tinged 
with it. His humor is not of the whole-souled kind that 
takes delight in the pure humanity underlying vulgar 
oddities ; it has no sympathy with such characters as Wil- 
kins Micawber and Captain Costigan, perhaps not even 
with Pistol and Mistress Quickly. But De Quincey had 



INTRODUCTION. XIX 

a keen eye for the incongruous, for the discrepancy be- 
tween assertion and fact, promise and performance. Often 
this perception takes the form of good-natured banter. See 
his attacks upon Michelet and the French in general, in the 
Joan. At times his humor assumes the form of irony. See 
the passage on Miss Haumette, on the woman and donkey, 
the stocking-darning, and junior lords of the admiralty, 
pp. 17, 18. At other times it assumes the form of jesting 
with the terrible, e.g., in Murder Co7isidered as one of the 
Fine Arts. Possibly De Quincey's egotism, his obtrusion 
of his personality in writings not professedly autobiographi- 
cal, may also be attributed to his sense of humor ; he 
heightens the effect by the contrast between his personal 
insignificance and the significance of the situation. This 
is evident throughout the Mail Coach. Even his frequent 
mention of kicking as a favorite mode of punishment, see 
36 : 17, 49 : 25, 53 : 17, 90 : 16, must be self-irony, conscious 
or unconscious. One can scarcely imagine a man of De 
Quincey's physique and gentle refinement having any knowl- 
edge of the operation. 

Not the least of De Quincey's services to critical study is 
his strenuous enforcement of the distinction, due originally 
to Wordsworth, between the literature of knowledge and the 
literature of power. The one speaks merely to the under- 
standing, to our desire of knowledge, and its utterances are 
necessarily superseded by later discoveries and wider general- 
ization. The other speaks to the higher understanding, the 
reason (in Coleridge's sense), through the affections of 
pleasure and sympathy, and its utterances can never be 
superseded. De Quincey illustrates the difference by com- 
paring Newton's Principia, the power of which " has 
transmigrated into other forms," with the Iliad, the Pro- 
metheus of yEschylus, King Lear, Paradise Lost, which 
" never can transmigrate into new incarnations." The dis- 
tinction is just and helpful. Yet Professor Masson is right 
in suggesting that it is not free from danger. Besides, we 
should consider that scientific style, so to speak, is only 



XX INTRODUCTION. 

in its infancy. The great discoverers and investigators of 
modern times either wrote in a dead language, Latin, or, if 
they made use of their mother tongue, they gave no heed to 
the art of expression. But in our own day the consciousness 
is gaining ground that science and art are not at variance, 
but may be mutually helpful ; that the explorer of the secrets 
of nature need not ignore the language of man's heart and 
man's imagination. The artistic treatment that has charmed 
the present generation in the writings of Darwin, Huxley, 
Tyndall, will survive after their scientific principles have 
" transmigrated." A thoroughly well-written book, whether 
of fiction or of fact, will always find readers. All the more 
is it to be deplored, therefore, that our present schools of 
science should ignore this side of training. They impart a 
wonderful deal of knowledge, they graduate pupils in a full 
panoply of facts and formulas. But these pupils are insen- 
sible to the beauty that inheres in all truth ; they have no 
appreciation of form, no gift of communicating themselves. 
They need to be introduced to the literature of power. And 
perhaps De Ouincey himself may best serve their need. Is 
he not the living contradiction of his own postulate that 
there is a wall of separation between knowledge and power? 
He is not a writer of pure imagination ; does not belong in 
the category of Homer, ^Eschylus, Shakspere, Milton. His 
basis is always that of fact, historical or biographical fact ; 
his imaginings are merely the adjuncts of this fact. Yet, 
by virtue of the illumining power of his treatment, he con- 
verts the dry facts into spiritual truth. He is our great 
teacher of form, perhaps our greatest teacher in prose. 
Compared with him, Macaulay is unimaginative. Carlyle has 
imagination enough, and in certain features of style is even 
superior to De Ouincey. But his imagination is not only 
bizarre at times, and confusing to the reader, but — a much 
more dangerous fault — is often the mere handmaid of arro- 
gant and illogical doctrines. His notorious article on Scott, 
for instance, is a masterpiece of constructive imagination, 
inculcating with preternatural energy what is at bottom a 



INTRODUCTION. XXI 

falsehood. De Quincey's imaginings, if not in every single 
instance consonant with the pure white light of reason, at 
least never willfully pervert the truth. 

STYLE. 

The most systematic treatment is to be found in the late 
Professor Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature. 
The following remarks, although influenced by Minto, are 
independent, being prepared with regard to the present 
texts. 

Grammar. De Ouincey seems to favor the vague rela- 
tive pronoun that at the expense of the more precise who or 
which. See " the poor shepherd girl . . . that " p. I : 3 ; 
" I, that have leisure to read," 4 : 31 ; " in those that . . . 
were always teasing her," 10 : 24 ; " Charlotte Corday, that 
in the bloom of youth, that with the loveliest of persons," 
33 : 27; "English soldier — who had sworn to throw a fagot 
on her scaffold . . . that did so, that fulfilled his vow," 
41 : 23. The change here from who to that is certainly not 
elegant. In the sentence : " But by her side . . . w r on at 
last," 117 : 17-23, the relative pronoun is that; the which, 
117 : 21, is not a pronoun, but a pronominal adjective, and 
the conjunction that, 1 17 : 22, is superfluous. " But at inter- 
vals that sang together," 114 : 1, is unusual, for " but who 
at intervals sang together." 

A neat example of the old ethical dative is "Unhorse 
me, knock 7ne," 100 : 15. 

The of in the phrase " in comparison of ourselves," 
98 : 32, sounds old-fashioned ; is it English in distinction 
from American ? In the phrases : " Coming forward on the 
eye," 13 : 21 ; " upon a sound from afar," no: 23 ; " upon 
the least shadow of failure," 103 : 2, the peculiar use of the 
preposition is very happy ; also in " armed into courage," 
15:10; "relents into reasons," 1:13. Unusual is " on 
different motives," 20 : 15, for " from " or " with." 

With reference to the recent discussion of nor-or and the 
accompanying verb, it may be worth while to note: " Not 



xxil INTRODUCTION. 

a hoof nor a wheel was to be heard," 96 : 6 ; " could not dis- 
tinguish the tendencies nor decipher the forms," 13 : 12. 

" Some time or other," 4 : 30 ; " the three first," 122 : 5, are 
conversational turns rather than literary. 

The plural glooms, 13 : 10, 42 : 26, is unusual. It occurs 
in Savage's Wanderer, but that is scarcely an authority. 

As an Englishman of the English, De Quincey is scrupu- 
lous in the use of shall and will. Attention is called to the 
delicate discrimination in : "€he it is, I engage, that shall 
take my lord's brief. She it is, bishop, that would plead for 
you ; yes, bishop, SHE — when heaven and earth are silent," 
45 : 21. Also to the expression : " Who have thrown them- 
selves boldly on the judgment of a far posterity, that should 
have had time to review, to ponder, to compare," 7:1. 

Professor Masson, ch. xi, end, criticises De Quincey 's 
use of such participial forms as supposing. A like expres- 
sion is " excepting one man," 25 : 12, where grammatical 
logic demands " one man excepted." But in America this 
use of " excepting," etc., is almost universal. 

In the arrangement of words and phrases De Quincey is 
usually faultless. However involved the sentence may be, 
each part is in its proper place. But occasionally one may 
detect a slight aberration. Thus, " as many a better man 
than D'Arc does," 18: 15, refers grammatically to making 
holes in stockings, whereas it is intended to refer to mending 
them. Again, 94:7, "this infirmity" does not refer to 
" thou snorest," but to " the vicious habit of sleeping," a few 
lines above. As it now stands, " this infirmity " seems to 
suggest that the Pagan Pantheon was given to snoring ; this 
was assuredly not in the author's mind. 

" She never sang together with the songs," etc., 2 : 20, and 
"For all, except this comfort," etc., 43 : 23, are not perfectly 
clear. 

Vocabulary. This is one of the richest in our literature ; 
in fact we may doubt if any writer in English had a greater 
variety of words at his command. This profusion is partly 
the result of De Quincey's extensive reading ; partly the 



INTRODUCTION. XXlll 

expression of his determination to be perfectly exact. He 
does not hesitate to go to any length, whether of erudition 
or of colloquialism, in his quest of a word that shall convey 
his meaning, no more, no less. Herein he differs from 
Macaulay, who rarely oversteps the conventional, and often 
contents himself with stating his thought halfway. On the 
other hand De Quincey is less barbaric than Carlyle ; he 
rarely coins a word outright, like Carlyle's famous " gigman- 
ity," or " Big-endian and Little-endian." His coinages are 
more scholarly; see sigh-born, 96 : 16, with the note. 

For samples of De Quincey's selection of homely but very 
technical words, see burgoo, 38:27; quartering, 99:15, 
58:15; turrets, 68 : 4. 

For learned technical terms see radix of the series, 98 : 19 ; 
confluent, applied to roads, 93:21; decussated, 9:21; 
determinate and ample separation, 56 : 28 ; allocating, 
55 : 9; equable transpareiicy, 97 : 16 ; diphrelatic, 91 ".27. 
De Quincey's remark upon this word, quoted in the note, 
gives the key to his method. 

Frequently De Quincey uses a word in its earlier etymo- 
logical sense ; e. g„ " saintly passion " (^suffering), 23 : 32 ; 
"piety to France" (=filial affection), 10:26; "false luxu- 
rious confidence " (^unjustifiable, wrong), 96: 7. 

" The right hemisphere for a peep at us," 33 : 14, is an apt 
illustration of the author's scientific accuracy and quaintness 
combined. 

In " lawny thickets," 65 : 8, " reedy gig," 101 : 19, " cany 
carriage," 106 : 1, De Quincey resorts to an adjective forma- 
tion which cannot be commended, and which gives to the 
diction a touch almost of effeminacy. 

His use of figurative language, especially for illustration, 
is very lavish. Thus, his comparison of the horse to a 
leopard, 61 : 8, 75 : 9 ; " the tiger roar of his [Death's] voice," 
106 : 29 ; the " crane-neck " movement of the carters, 58 : 1 5. 
Of a much higher rhetorical order are " drank from the cup 
of rest," 2:19," bore each an orchestral part in this universal 
lull," 97 : 11, in which rest and silence, mere negations, are 



xxiv IN TROD UC TION. 

treated as positive entities. The entire sentence, " All these 
writers . . . nothing else to challenge," 4 : 22-30, is a mass 
of figure, yet without being " mixed." Whereas "wedge of 
native resources . . . rekindling national pride . . . plant- 
ing the dauphin on his feet," 24:22, is decidedly " mixed." 

The paragraph beginning "On the Wednesday," 34: 13, 
is a specimen of skill in passing from high pitch to sober 
statement ; it is abrupt but not awkward. 

The sentence, " The golde'n tubes of the organ . . . 
heart-shattering music," 117 126-30, at once so graphic and 
so mystic in its figurative expression, is one of many indica- 
tions of De Quincey's love of music. In truth the whole 
Dream-Fugue is a combination, unsurpassed except in cer- 
tain In Memoriam passages, of mystic vision and mystic 
harmony. 

De Ouincey was no follower of the school that would pro- 
scribe Latin-French terms and substitute for them homely 
Anglo-Saxon. In his eyes every word, of whatever origin, 
once admitted and sanctioned by use, was not only good but 
even indispensable. He needed all sorts and conditions of 
words to express his endless shades of meaning. Not the 
provenience of a word was his criterion, but its function. 
Yet no writer has known better than he that Latin-French 
and Anglo-Saxon have different functions, or known better 
how to combine them. The reader should note carefully the 
passage, " She might not prefigure . . . that she heard 
forever," 3:21-31, how long and short, foreign and native, 
commingle, how the words expressive of condition and men- 
tal state are foreign, the words of action native. 

Above all, De Quincey's style is continuous; to use a 
favorite term with him and Coleridge, sequacious. By this 
is not meant a sustained style, one that never lets itself down 
below a certain high level ; for every reader of De Quincey 
knows, and the foan gives abundant evidence, that he often 
drops nimbly enough from the pathetic to the ridiculous. 
A sequacious style is one that unfolds the writer's thought 
step by step, in due logical order, without haste and without 



IN TROD UC TION. XXV 

rest, without gaps and unexplained jumps ; in this style no 
one thought or feeling is uttered for its own sake alone, but 
everything is said with regard to the sequence, and the 
watchful eye of the master is upon the whole and upon 
every part. The master does not let himself be carried away 
by his own creations ; he restrains himself, he obeys the laws 
of art, says what must be said and suppresses everything 
that is not in keeping with the evolution of his thought. 
Certainly the Joan is a good example of the sequacious ; 
there is scarcely a word, certainly not a phrase, which is not 
there because the author, after careful deliberation, judges 
that it ought to be there, as an organic part of his art-work. 
The humorous touches heighten the effect ; the apparent 
digressions are parts of the general theme as the author 
conceives it. 

Objection has often been made to De Quincey's lavish 
use of slang. See his collection of terms from the prize 
ring in the paper on Sir William Hamilton, v. 325, or the 
passage on Longinus, quoted by Minto, Manual of Prose, 
p. 71. Akin to slang is his tone of affected patronage of the 
person whom he is discussing. Thus, 36:21, 24, 31, he 
dubs Thomas a Kempis " Tom." Going to the opposite 
extreme of affected politeness, 37 : 27, he speaks of him as 
" Mr." a Kempis. The Jewish historian, in another paper, 
he claps on the back familiarly as " Joe." From the purist's 
point of view these mannerisms are of course indefensible. 
But to the psychologist they are genuine revelations of the 
writer. De Quincey's mind was acute, refined, perhaps 
over-refined, over-loaded with life's burdens. It must have 
some vent, and this was the vent. It was his way of being 
a man with men, of echoing Faust's ejaculation : Hier bin 
ich Mensch, hier darf ich's sein. 

Of his slang it may be trenchantly said that it is harmless, 
because it does not lend itself to imitation. Coming from 
a man of learning, it can be understood and appreciated 
only by a reader who is alive to the graces of learn- 
ing. Being neither coarse nor vulgar, it has no attrac- 



xxvi INTRODUCTION. 

tions for the coarse and vulgar ; it is in the strictest sense 
esoteric. And being individual and characteristic, so char- 
acteristic indeed that we cannot imagine De Quincey 
without it, there is no temptation for any other writer to 
imitate it ; one might as soon venture to imitate the idio- 
syncracies of Carlyle. We should miss something from the 
make-up of our literary prose, were we deprived of this 
elfish " chaff." 



THOMAS DE QLJINCEY. 



JOAN OF ARC* 

What is to be thought of her ? What is to be 

thought of the poor shepherd girl from the hills and 

forests of Lorraine, that — like the Hebrew shepherd 

boy from the hills and forests of Judea — rose sud- 

5 denly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the 

* "Arc." — Modern France, that should know a great deal 
better than myself, insists that the name is not D' Arc — i. e. , of 
Arc — but Dare. Now it happens sometimes that, if a person 
whose position guarantees his access to the best information will 

10 content himself with gloomy dogmatism, striking the table with 
his fist, and saying in a terrific voice, " It is so, and there's an 
end of it," one bows deferentially, and submits. But, if, unhap- 
pily for himself, won by this docility, he relents too amiably into 
reasons and arguments, probably one raises an insurrection 

1 5 against him that may never be crushed ; for in the fields of logic 
one can skirmish, perhaps, as well as he. Had he confined him- 
self to dogmatism, he would have intrenched his position in dark- 
ness, and have hidden his own vulnerable points. But coming 
down to base reasons he lets in light, and one sees where to plant 

20 the blows. Now, the worshipful reason of modern France for 
disturbing the old received spelling is that Jean Hordal, a descend- 
ant of La Pucelle's brother, spelled the name Dare in 161 2. 
But what of that ? It is notorious that what small matter of 
spelling Providence had thought fit to disburse among man in the 

25 seventeenth century was all monopolized by printers ; now, 
M. Hordal was not a printer. 



2 DE QUINCE Y. 

religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, 
to a station in the van of armies, and to the more 
perilous station at the right hand of kings ? The 
Hebrew boy inaugurated his patriotic mission by an 
act, by a victorious act, such as no man could deny. 5 
But so did the girl of Lorraine, if we read her story 
as it was read by those who saw her nearest. Adverse 
armies bore witness to the boy as no pretender ; but 
so they did to the gentle girl. Judged by the voices 
of all who saw them from a station of good will, both 10 
were found true and loyal to any promises involved 
in their first acts. Enemies it was that made the 
difference between their subsequent fortunes. The 
boy rose to a splendor and a noonday prosperity, 
both personal and public, that rang through the rec- 15 
ords of his people, and became a byword among his 
posterity for a thousand years, until the scepter was 
departing from Judah. The poor forsaken girl, on 
the contrary, drank not herself from that cup of rest 
which she had secured for France. She never sang 20 
together with the songs that rose in her native Dom- 
remy as echoes to the departing steps of invaders. 
She mingled not in the festal dances at Vaucouleurs 
which celebrated in rapture the redemption of France. 
No ! for her voice was then silent ; no ! for her feet 25 
were dust. Pure, innocent, noble-hearted girl ! whom, 
from earliest youth, ever I believed in as full of truth 
and self-sacrifice, this was among the strongest pledges 
for thy truth, that never once — no, not for a moment 
of weakness — didst thou revel in the vision of coronets 30 
and honor from man. Coronets for thee ! Oh, no ! 
Honors, if they come when all is over, are for those 



JO A A? OF ARC. 3 

that share thy blood.* Daughter of Domremy, when 
the gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be 
sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, king of 
France, but she will not hear thee. Cite her by the 
5 apparitors to come and receive a robe of honor, but 
she will be found en contumace. When the thunders 
of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall 
proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that 
gave up all for her country, thy ear, young shepherd 

iogirl, will have been deaf for five centuries. To suffer 
and to do, that was thy portion in this life ; that was thy 
destiny ; and not for a moment was it hidden from thy- 
self. Life, thou saidst, is short ; and the sleep which is 
in the grave is long ; let me use that life, so transitory, 

15 for the glory of those heavenly dreams destined to com- 
fort the sleep which is so long ! This pure creature 
— pure from every suspicion of even a visionary self- 
interest, even as she was pure in senses more obvious 
— never once did this holy child, as regarded herself, 

20 relax from her belief in the darkness that was travel- 
ing to meet her. She might not prefigure the very 
manner of her death ; she saw not in vision, perhaps, 
the aerial altitude of the fiery scaffold, the spectators 
without end, on every road, pouring into Rouen as to 

25 a coronation, the surging smoke, the volleying flames, 
the hostile faces all around, the pitying eye that 
lurked but here and there, until nature and imperish- 
able truth broke loose from artificial restraints — these 
might not be apparent through the mists of the hurry. 

30 ing future. But the voice that called her to death, 
that she heard forever. 

* " Those that share thy bloody — A collateral relative of Joanna's 
was subsequently ennobled by the title of Dn Lys. 



4 DE QUINCE V. 

Great was the throne of France even in those days, 
and great was he that sat upon it ; but well Joanna 
knew that not the throne, nor he that sat upon it, was 
for her; but, on the contrary, that she was for them; 
not she by them, but they by her, should rise from 5 
the dust. Gorgeous were the lilies of France, and 
for centuries had the privilege to spread their beauty 
over land and sea, until, in another century, the wrath 
of God and man combined to wither them ; but well 
Joanna knew, early at Domremy she had read that 10 
bitter truth, that the lilies of France would decorate 
no garland for her. Flower nor bud, bell nor blossom, 
would ever bloom for her ! 

But stay. What reason is there for taking up this 15 
subject of Joanna precisely in the spring of 1847 ? 
Might it not have been left till the spring of 1947, or, 
perhaps, left till called for ? Yes, but it is called for, 
and clamorously. You are aware, reader, that among 
the many original thinkers whom modern France has 20 
produced, one of the reputed leaders is M. Michelet. 
All these writers are of a revolutionary cast ; not in a 
political sense merely, but in all senses ; mad, often- 
times, as March hares ; crazy with the laughing gas 
of recovered liberty; drunk with the wine-cup of 25 
their mighty Revolution, snorting, whinnying, throw- 
up their heels, like wild horses in the boundless 
pampas, and running races of defiance with snipes, 
or with the winds, or with their own shadows, if they 
can find nothing else to challenge. Some time or3<? 
other, I, that have leisure to read, may introduce you, 
that have not, to two or three dozen of these writers ; 



JOAN OP ARC. 5 

of whom I can assure you beforehand that they are 
often profound, and at intervals are even as impas- 
sioned as if they were come of our best English 
blood. But now, confining our attention to M. 
5 Michelet, we in England — who know him best by his 
worst book, the book against priests, etc. — know him 
disadvantageously. That book is a rhapsody of 
incoherence. But his " History of France " is quite 
another thing. A man, in whatsoever craft he sails, 

10 cannot stretch away out of sight when he is linked to 
the windings of the shore by towing ropes of History. 
Facts, and the consequences of facts, draw the writer 
back to the falconer's lure from the giddiest heights 
of speculation. Here, therefore — in his " France " — 

15 if not always free from flightiness, if now and then off 
like a rocket for an airy wheel in the clouds, M. Mich- 
elet, with natural politeness, never forgets that he 
has left a large audience waiting for him on earth, 
and gazing upward in anxiety for his return ; return, 

20 therefore, he does. But History, though clear of cer- 
tain temptations in one direction, has separate dangers 
of its own. It is impossible so to write a history of 
France, or of England — works becoming every hour 
more indispensable to the inevitably political man of 

25 this day — without perilous openings for error. If I, 
for instance, on the part of England, should happen 
to turn my labors into that channel, and (on the 
model of Lord Percy going to Chevy Chase) 

A vow to God should make 
30 My pleasure in the Michelet woods 

Three summer days to take, 

probably, from simple delirium, I might hunt M. 



6 DE QUINCE V. 

Michelet into delirium tremens. Two strong angels 
stand by the side of History, whether French history 
or English, as heraldic supporters : the angel of 
research on the left hand, that must read millions of 
dusty parchments, and of pages blotted with lies ; 5 
the angel of meditation on the right hand, that must 
cleanse these lying records with fire, even as of old 
the draperies of asbestos were cleansed, and must 
quicken them into regenerated life. Willingly I 
acknowledge that no man will ever avoid innumer- 10 
able errors of detail ; with so vast a compass of 
ground to traverse, this is impossible ; but such errors 
(though I have a bushel on hand, at M. Michelet's 
service) are not the game I chase ; it is the bitter and 
unfair spirit in which M. Michelet writes against 15 
England. Even that, after all, is but my secondary 
object ; the real one is Joanna, the Pucelle d'Orleans 
for herself. 

I am not going to write the history of La Pucelle : 
to do this, or even circumstantially to report the his- 20 
tory of her persecution and bitter death, of her 
struggle with false witnesses and with ensnaring 
judges, it would be necessary to have before us all 
the documents, and therefore the collection only now 
forthcoming in Paris.* But my purpose is narrower. 25 
There have been great thinkers, disdaining the care- 
less judgments of contemporaries, who have thrown 
themselves boldly on the judgment of a far posterity, 

* "Only now forthcoming." — In 1847 began the publication 
(from official records) of Joanna's trial. It was interrupted, I ■* 
fear, by the convulsions of 1848 ; and whether even yet finished I 
do not know. 



JOAN OF ARC. 7 

that should have had time to review, to ponder, to 
compare. There have been great actors on the stage 
of tragic humanity that might, with the same depth of 
confidence, have appealed from the levity of com- 
5 patriot friends — too heartless for the sublime interest 
of their story, and too impatient for the labor of sift- 
ing its perplexities — to the magnanimity and justice 
of enemies. To this class belongs the Maid of Arc. 
The ancient Romans were too faithful to the ideal of 

i j grandeur in themselves not to relent, after a genera- 
tion or two, before the grandeur of Hannibal. Mithri- 
dates, a more doubtful person, yet, merely for the 
magic perseverance of his indomitable malice, won 
from the same Romans the only real honor that ever 

15 he received on earth. And we English have ever 
shown the same homage to stubborn enmity. To 
work unflinchingly for the ruin of England ; to say 
through life, by word and by deed, Delenda est Anglia 
Victrix / — that one purpose of malice, faithfully pur- 

20 sued, has quartered some people upon our national 
funds of homage as by a perpetual annuity. Better 
than an inheritance of service rendered to England 
herself has sometimes proved the most insane hatred 
to England. Hyder All, even his son Tippoo, though 

25 so far inferior, and Napoleon, have all benefited by 
this disposition among ourselves to exaggerate the 
merit of diabolic enmity. Not one of these men 
was ever capable, in a solitary instance, of praising 
an enemy (what do you say to that, reader?); and 

30 yet, in their behalf, we consent to forget, not their 
crimes only, but (which is worse) their hideous 
bigotry and anti-magnanimous egotism — for nation- 



8 DE QUINCE Y. 

ality it was not. Suffren, and some half dozen of 
other French nautical heroes, because rightly they did 
us all the mischief they could (which was really 
great), are names justly reverenced in England. On 
the same principle, La Pucelle d'Orleans, the victo- 5 
rious enemy of England, has been destined to receive 
her deepest commemoration from the magnanimous 
justice of Englishmen. 

Joanna, as we in England should call her, but ac- 
cording to her own statement, Jeanne (or, as M. Mich- 10 
elet asserts, Jean*) D'Arc, was born at Domremy, 
a village on the marches of Lorraine and Champagne, 
and dependent upon the town of Vaucouleurs. I 
have called her a Lorrainer, not simply because the 
word is prettier, but because Champagne too odiously 15 
reminds us English of what are for us imaginary 
wines — which, undoubtedly, La Pucelle tasted as rarely 

* "Jean.'* — M. Michelet asserts that there was a mystical 
meaning at that era in calling a child Jean ; it implied a secret 
commendation of a child, if not a dedication, to St. John the 20 
evangelist, the beloved disciple, the apostle of love and mysterious 
visions. But, really, as the name was so exceedingly common, few 
people will detect a mystery in calling a boy by the name of Jack, 
though it does seem mysterious to call a girl Jack. It may be 
less so in France, where a beautiful practice has always prevailed 25 
of giving a boy his mother's name — preceded and strengthened 
by a male name, as Charles Anne, Victor Victoire. In cases where 
a mother's memory has been unusually dear to a son, this vocal 
memento of her, locked into the circle of his own name, gives to 
it the tenderness of a testamentary relic, or a funeral ring. I 30 
presume, therefore, that La Pucelle must have borne the bap- 
tismal name of Jeanne Jean ; the latter with no reference, per- 
haps, to so sublime a person as St. John, but simply to some 
relative. 



JOAN OF ARC. 9 

as we English : we English, because the champagne of 
London is chiefly grown in Devonshire ; La Pucelle, 
because the champagne of Champagne never, by any 
chance, flowed into the fountain of Domremy, from 

5 which only she drank. M. Michelet will have her to 
be a Champenoise y and for no better reason than that 
she " took after her father," who happened to be 
a Champenois. 

These disputes, however, turn on refinements too 

ionice. Domremy stood upon the frontiers, and, like 
other frontiers, produced a mixed race, representing 
the cis and the trans. A river (it is true) formed the 
boundary line at this point — the river Meuse ; and 
that, in old days, might have divided the populations ; 

15 but in these days it did not ; there were bridges, 
there were ferries, and weddings crossed from the 
right bank to the left. Here lay two great roads, not 
so much for travelers that were few, as for armies that 
were too many by half. These two roads, one of 

20 which was the great highroad between France and 
Germany, decussated at this very point ; which is a 
learned way of saying that they formed a St. Andrew's 
Cross, or letter X. I hope the compositor will choose 
a good large X ; in which case the point of intersec- 

25 tion, the locus of conflux and intersection for these 
four diverging arms, will finish the reader's geographi- 
cal education, by showing him to a hair's-breadth 
where it was that Domremy stood. These roads, so 
grandly situated, as great trunk arteries between two 

30 mighty realms, 1 and haunted forever by wars or 

1 And reminding one of that inscription, so justly admired by 
Paul Richter, which a Russian Czarina placed on a guide-post 
near Moscow : This is the road that leads to Constantinople. 



io DE QUINCE Y. 

rumors of wars, decussated (for anything I know to 
the contrary) absolutely under Joanna's bedroom win- 
dow ; one rolling away to the right, past M. D'Arc's 
old barn, and the other unaccountably preferring to 
sweep round that odious man's pig-sty to the left. 5 

On whichever side of the border chance had thrown 
Joanna, the same love to France would have been 
nurtured. For it is a strange fact, noticed by M. Mich- 
elet and others, that the Dukes of Bar and Lor- 
raine had for generations pursued the policy of eter- 10 
nal warfare with France on their own account, yet 
also of eternal amity and league with France in case 
anybody else presumed to attack her. Let peace 
settle upon France, and before long you might rely 
upon seeing the little vixen Lorraine flying at the 15 
throat of France. Let France be assailed by a for- 
midable enemy, and instantly you saw a Duke of Lor- 
raine insisting on having his own throat cut in support 
of France ; which favor accordingly was cheerfully 
granted to him in three great successive battles : twice 20 
by the English, viz., at Crecy and Agincourt, once by 
the Sultan at Nicopolis. 

This sympathy with France during great eclipses, 
in those that during ordinary seasons were always 
teasing her with brawls and guerilla inroads, strength- 25 
ened the natural piety to France of those that were 
confessedly the children of her own house. The out- 
posts of France, as one may call the great frontier 
provinces, were of all localities the most devoted to 
the Fleurs de Lys. To witness, at any great crisis, 30 
the generous devotion to these lilies of the little fiery 
cousin that in gentler weather was forever tilting at 



JOAN OF ARC. II 

the breast of France, could not but fan the zeal of 
France's legitimate daughters ; while to occupy a post 
of honor on the frontiers against an old hereditary 
enemy of France would naturally stimulate this zeal 
5 by a sentiment of martial pride, by a sense of danger 
always threatening, and of hatred always smoldering. 
That great four-headed road was a perpetual memento 
to patriotic ardor. To say " This way lies the road to 
Paris, and that other way to Aix-la-Chapelle ; this to 

10 Prague, that to Vienna," nourished the warfare of the 
heart by daily ministrations of sense. The eye that 
watched for the gleams of lance or helmet from the 
hostile frontier, the ear that listened for the groaning 
of wheels, made the highroad itself, with its relations 

15 to centers so remote, into a manual of patriotic duty. 

The situation, therefore, locally, of Joanna was full 

of profound suggestions to a heart that listened for 

the stealthy steps of change and fear that too surely 

were in motion. But, if the place were grand, the 

20 time, the burden of the time, was far more so. The 
air overhead in its upper chambers was hurtling with 
the obscure sound ; was dark with sullen fermenting 
of storms that had been gathering for a hundred and 
thirty years. The battle of Agincourt in Joanna's child- 

25 hood had reopened the wounds of France. Crecy and 
Poictiers, those withering overthrows for the chivalry 
of France, had, before Agincourt occurred, been tran- 
quilized by more than half a century ; but this resur- 
rection of their trumpet wails made the whole series 

30 of battles and endless skirmishes take their stations 
as parts in one drama. The graves that had closed 
sixty years ago seemed to fly open in sympathy with 



12 DE QUINCE Y. 

a sorrow that echoed their own. The monarchy of 
France labored in extremity, rocked and reeled like 
a ship fighting with the darkness of monsoons. The 
madness of the poor king (Charles VI.) falling in at 
such a crisis, like the case of women laboring in child- 5 
birth during the storming of a city, trebled the awful- 
ness of the time. Even the wild story of the incident 
which had immediately occasioned the explosion of 
this madness — the case of a man unknown, gloomy, 
and perhaps maniacal himself, coming out of a forest 10 
at noonday, laying his hand upon the bridle of the 
king's horse, checking him for a moment to say, " Oh, 
king, thou art betrayed," and then vanishing, no man 
knew whither, as he had appeared for no man knew 
what — fell in with the universal prostration of mind 15 
that laid France on her knees, as before the slow un- 
weaving of some ancient prophetic doom. The fam- 
ines, the extraordinary diseases, the insurrections of 
the peasantry up and down Europe — these . were 
chords struck from the same mysterious harp ; but 20 
these were transitory chords. There had been others 
of deeper and more ominous sound. The termination 
of the Crusades, the destruction of the Templars, the 
Papal interdicts, the tragedies caused or suffered by 
the house of Anjou, and by the Emperor — these were 25 
full of a more permanent significance. But, since 
then, the colossal figure of feudalism was seen stand- 
ing, as it were on tiptoe, at Crecy, for flight from 
earth : that was a revolution unparalleled ; yet that 
was a trifle by comparison with the more fearful revo- 30 
lutions that were mining below the Church. By her 
own internal schisms, by the abominable spectacle of a 



JOAN OF ARC. 13 

double Pope — so that no man, except through political 
bias, could even guess which was Heaven's vicegerent, 
and which the creature of Hell — the Church was re- 
hearsing, as in still earlier forms she had already re- 
5 hearsed, those vast rents in her foundations which no 
man should ever heal. 

These were the loftiest peaks of the cloudland in the 
skies that to the scientific gazer first caught the colors 
of the new morning in advance. But the whole vast 

10 range alike of sweeping glooms overhead dwelt upon 
all meditative minds, even upon those that could not 
distinguish the tendencies nor decipher the forms. It 
was, therefore, not her own age alone, as affected by 
its immediate calamities, that lay with such weight 

15 upon Joanna's mind, but her own age as one section 
in a vast mysterious drama, unweaving through a cen- 
tury back, and drawing nearer continually to some 
dreadful crisis. Cataracts and rapids were heard 
roaring ahead ; and signs were seen far back, by help 

20 of old men's memories, which answered secretly to 
signs now coming forward on the eye, even as locks 
answer to keys. It was not wonderful that in such a 
haunted solitude, with such a haunted heart, Joanna 
should see angelic visions, and hear angelic voices. 

25 These voices whispered to her forever the duty, self- 
imposed, of delivering France. Five years she list- 
ened to these monitory voices with internal struggles. 
At length she could resist no longer. Doubt gave 
way ; and she left her home forever in order to pre- 

3° sent herself at the dauphin's court. 

The education of this poor girl was mean according 
to the present standard : was ineffably grand, accord- 



14 DE QUINCE Y. 

ing to a purer philosophic standard : and only not 
good for our age because for us it would be unattain- 
able. She read nothing, for she could not read ; but 
she had heard others read parts of the Roman martyr- 
ology. She wept in sympathy with the sad " Mise- 5 
reres " of the Romish Church ; she rose to heaven with 
the glad triumphant " Te Deums " of Rome ; she drew 
her comfort and her vital strength from the rites of the 
same Church. But, next after these spiritual advan- 
tages, she owed most to the advantages of her situa- ir 
tion. The fountain of Domremy was on the brink of 
a boundless forest ; and it was haunted to that degree 
by fairies that the parish priest (curS) was obliged to 
read mass there once a year, in order to keep them in 
any decent bounds. Fairies are important, even in a 15 
statistical view : certain weeds mark poverty in the 
soil ; fairies mark its solitude. As surely as the wolf 
retires before cities does the fairy sequester herself 
from the haunts of the licensed victualer. A village 
is too much for her nervous delicacy; at most, she 20 
can tolerate a distant view of a hamlet. We may 
judge, therefore, by the uneasiness and extra trouble 
which they gave to the parson, in what strength the 
fairies mustered at Domremy, and, by a satisfactory 
consequence, how thinly sown with men and women 25 
must have been that region even in its inhabited spots. 
But the forests of Domremy — those were the glories 
of the land : for in them abode mysterious powers 
and ancient secrets that towered into tragic strength. 
" Abbeys there were, and abbey windows " — " like 30 
Moorish temples of the Hindoos" — that exercised 
even princely power both in Lorraine and in the Ger- 



JOAN OF ARC. 15 

man Diets. These had their sweet bells that pierced 
the forests for many a league at matins or vespers, 
and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, and 
scattered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no 
5 degree to disturb the deep solitude of the region ; 
yet many enough to spread a network or awning of 
Christian sanctity over what else might have seemed 
a heathen wilderness. This sort of religious talisman 
being secured, a man the most afraid of ghosts (like 

10 myself, suppose, or the reader) becomes armed into 
courage to wander for days in their sylvan recesses. 
The mountains of the Vosges, on the eastern frontier 
of France, have never attracted much notice from 
Europe, except in 1813-14 for a few brief months, 

15 when they fell within Napoleon's line of defense 
against the Allies. But they are interesting for this 
among other features, that they do not, like some 
loftier ranges, repel woods ; the forests and the hills 
are on sociable terms. " Live and 1 1 live " is their 

20 motto. For this reason, in part, these tracts in Lorraine 
were a favorite hunting-ground with the Carlovingian 
princes. About six hundred years before Joanna's 
childhood, Charlemagne was known to have hunted 
there. That, of itself, was a grand incident in the 

25 traditions of a forest or a chase. In these vast for- 
ests, also, were to be found (if anywhere to be found) 
those mysterious fawns that tempted solitary hunters 
into visionary and perilous pursuits. Here was seen 
(if anywhere seen) that ancient stag who was already 

30 nine hundred years old, but possibly a hundred or two 
more, when met by Charlemagne ; and the thing was 
put beyond doubt by the inscription upon his golden 



1 6 DE QUWCEY. 

collar. I believe Charlemagne knighted the stag ; 
and, if ever he is met again by a king, he ought to be 
made an earl, or, being upon the marches of France, 
a marquis. Observe, I don't absolutely vouch for all 
these things : my own opinion varies. On a fine 5 
breezy forenoon I am audaciously skeptical ; but as 
twilight sets in my credulity grows steadily, till it 
becomes equal to anything that could be desired. 
And I have heard candid sportsmen declare that, 
outside of these very forests, they laughed loudly at 10 
all the dim tales connected with their haunted soli- 
tudes, but, on reaching a spot notoriously eighteen 
miles deep within them, they agreed with Sir Roger de 
Coverleythat a good deal might be said on both sides. 

Such traditions, or any others that (like the stag) r5 
connect distant generations with each other, are, for 
that cause, sublime ; and the sense of the shadowy, 
connected with such appearances that reveal them- 
selves or not according to circumstances, leaves a 
coloring of sanctity over ancient forests, even in those 20 
minds that utterly reject the legend as a fact. 

But, apart from ail distinct stories of that order, in 
any solitary frontier between two great empires — as 
here, for instance, or in the desert between Syria and 
the Euphrates — there is an inevitable tendency, in 25 
minds of any deep sensibility, to people the solitudes 
with phantom images of powers that were of old so 
vast. Joanna, therefore, in her quiet occupation of a 
shepherdess, would be led continually to brood over 
the political condition of her country by the traditions 30 
of the past no less than by the mementoes of the local 
present. 



JOAN OF ARC. 17 

M. Michelet, indeed, says that La Puoelle was not a 
shepherdess. I beg his pardon ; she was. What he 
rests upon I guess pretty well : it is the evidence of 
a woman called Haumette, the most confidential 
5 friend of Joanna. Now, she is a good witness, and a 
good girl, and I like her ; for she makes a natural 
and affectionate report of Joanna's ordinary life. 
But still, however good she may be as a witness, 
Joanna is better ; and she, when speaking to the 

10 dauphin, calls herself in the Latin report Bergereta. 
Even Haumette confesses that Joanna tended sheep 
in her girlhood. And I believe that, if Miss Hau- 
mette were taking coffee alone with me this very 
evening (February 12, 1847) — in which there would 

15 be no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, 
because I am an intense philosopher, and Miss H. 
would be hard upon 450 years old — she would admit 
the following comment upon her evidence to be right. 
A Frenchman, about forty years ago — M. Simond, in 

20 his " Travels " — mentions accidentally the following 
hideous scene as one steadily observed and watched 
by himself in chivalrous France not very long before 
the French Revolution: A peasant, was plowing; 
and the team that drew his plow was a donkey and a 

25 woman. Both were regularly harnessed ; both pulled 
alike. This is bad enough ; but the Frenchman adds 
that, in distributing his lashes, the peasant was obvi- 
ously desirous of being impartial ; or, if either of the 
yokefellows had a right to complain, certainly it was 

3° not the donkey. Now, in any country where such 
degradation of females could be tolerated by the state 
of manners, a woman of delicacy would shrink from 



i8 DE QUINCE Y. 

acknowledging, either for herself or her friend, that 
she had ever been addicted to any mode of labor not 
strictly domestic ; because, if once owning herself a 
prsedial servant, she would be sensible that this 
confession extended by probability in the hearer's 5 
thoughts to the having incurred indignities of this 
horrible kind. Haumette clearly thinks it more dig- 
nified for Joanna to have been darning the stockings 
of her horny-hoofed father, M. D'Arc, than keeping 
sheep, lest she might then be suspected of having 10 
ever done something worse. But, luckily, there was 
no danger of that : Joanna never was in service ; and 
my opinion is that her father should have mended his 
own stockings, since probably he was the party to 
make the holes in them, as many a better man than 15 
D'Arc does — meaning by that not myself, because, 
though probably a better man than D'Arc, I protest 
against doing anything of the kind. If I lived even 
with Friday in Juan Fernandez, either Friday must 
do all the darning, or else it must go undone. The 20 
better men that I meant were the sailors in the British 
navy, every man of whom mends his own stockings. 
Who else is to do it ? Do you suppose, reader, that 
the junior lords of the admiralty are under articles to 
darn for the navy ? 25 

The reason, meantime, for my systematic hatred of 
D'Arc is this : There was a story current in France 
before the Revolution, framed to ridicule the pauper 
aristocracy, who happened to have long pedigrees and 
short rent rolls : viz., that a head of such a house, 30 
dating from the Crusades, was overheard saying to his 
son, a Chevalier of St. Louis, " Chevalier, as-tu donne' 



JOAN OF ARC, 19 

au cochon a manger ? " Now, it is clearly made out by 
the surviving evidence that D'Arc would much have 
preferred continuing to say, " Ma fille, as-tu donne au 
cochon a manger ? " to saying, " Pucelle d 'Orleans, as-tu 
5 sauve les fleurs-de-lys? " There is an old English copy 
of verses which argues thus : 

If the man that turnips cries 
Cry not when his father dies, 
Then 'tis plain the man had rather 
10 Have a turnip than his father. 

I cannot say that the logic of these verses was ever 
entirely to my satisfaction. I do not see my way 
through it as clearly as could be wished. But I see 
my way most clearly through D'Arc ; and the result 

15 is — that he would greatly have preferred not merely a 
turnip to his father, but the saving a pound or so of 
bacon to saving the Oriflamme of France. 

It is probable (as M. Michelet suggests) that the 
title of Virgin or Pucelle had in itself, and apart from 

20 the miraculous stories about her, a secret power over 
the rude soldiery and partisan chiefs of that period ; 
for in such a person they saw a representative mani- 
festation of the Virgin Mary, who, in a course of cen- 
turies, had grown steadily upon the popular heart. 

25 As to Joanna's supernatural detection of the dau- 
phin (Charles VII.) among three hundred lords and 
knights, I am surprised at the credulity which could 
ever lend itself to that theatrical juggle. Who admires 
more than myself the sublime enthusiasm, the raptu- 

3orous faith in herself, of this pure creature ? But I am 
far from admiring stage artifices which not La Pucelle, 



20 DE QUINCEY, 

but the court, must have arranged ; nor can surrender 
myself to the conjurer's legerdemain, such as may be 
seen every day for a shilling. Southey's " Joan of 
Arc" was published in 1796. Twenty years after, 
talking with Southey, 1 was surprised to find him still 5 
owning a secret bias in favor of Joan, founded on her 
detection of the dauphin. The story, for the benefit 
of the reader new to the case, was this : La Pucelle 
was first made known to the dauphin, and presented 
to his court, at Chinon ; and here came her first trial. 10 
By way of testing her supernatural pretensions, she 
was to find out the royal personage among the 
whole ark of clean and unclean creatures. Failing 
in this coup d'essai^ she would not simply disappoint 
many a beating heart in the glittering crowd that on x 5 
different motives yearned for her success, but she 
would ruin herself, and, as the oracle within had told 
her, would, by ruining herself, ruin France. Our own 
Sovereign Lady Victoria rehearses annually a trial not 
so severe in degree, but the same in kind. She 20 
" pricks " for sheriffs. Joanna pricked for a king. 
But observe the difference : our own Lady pricks 
for two men out of three ; Joanna for one man out 
of three hundred. Happy Lady of the Islands and 
the Orient ! — she can go astray in her choice only by 25 
one-half : to the extent of one-half she must have 
the satisfaction of being right. And yet, even with 
these tight limits to the misery of a boundless discre- 
tion, permit me, Liege Lady, with all loyalty, to sub- 
mit that now and then you prick with your pin the 30 
wrong man. But the poor child from Domremy, 
shrinking under the gaze of a dazzling court — not 



JOAN OF ARC. 21 

because dazzling (for in visions she had seen those that 
were more so), but because some of them wore a scoff- 
ing smile on their features — how should she throw her 
line into so deep a river to angle for a king, where 
5 many a gay creature was sporting that masqueraded 
as kings in dress ! Nay, even more than any true 
king would have done : for, in Southey's version of 
the story, the dauphin says, by way of trying the 
virgin's magnetic sympathy with royalty, 

io On the throne, 

I the while mingling with the menial throng, 
Some courtier shall be seated. 

This usurper is even crowned : " the jeweled crown 
shines on a menial's head." But, really, that is " un 

\*>peu fort " ; and the mob of spectators might raise a 
scruple whether our friend the jackdaw upon the 
throne, and the dauphin himself, were not grazing the 
shins of treason. For the dauphin could not lend 
more than belonged to him. According to the popu- 

2olar notion, he had no crown for himself ; consequently 
none to lend, on any pretense whatever, until the con- 
secrated Maid should take him to Rheims. This was 
the, popular notion in France. But certainly it was the 
dauphin's interest to support the popular notion, as he 

25 meant to use the services of Joanna. For if he were 
king already, what was it that she could do for him 
beyond Orleans? That is to say, what more than a 
merely military service could she render him ? And, 
above all, if he were king without a coronation, and 

30 without the oil from the sacred ampulla, what advan- 
tage was yet open to him by celerity above his com- 



22 DE QUINCE Y. 

petitor, the English boy ? Now was to be a race for a 
coronation : he that should win that race carried the 
superstition of France along with him : he that should 
first be drawn from the ovens of Rheims was under 
that superstition baked into a king. 5 

La Pucelle, before she could be allowed to practice 
as a warrior, was put through her manual and platoon 
exercise, as a pupil in divinity, at the bar of six emi- 
nent men in wigs. According to Southey (v. 393, 
bk iii., in the original edition of his " Joan of Arc,") 10 
she " appalled the doctors." It's not easy to do 
that : but they had some reason to feel bothered, 
as that surgeon would assuredly feel bothered who, 
upon proceeding to dissect a subject, should find the 
subject retaliating as a dissector upon himself, espe- 15 
cially if Joanna ever made the speech to them which 
occupies v. 354-391, bk. iii. It is a double impossi- 
bility : 1st, because a piracy from Tindal's " Chris- 
tianity as old as the Creation " — a piracy a parte ante, 
and by three centuries ; 2d, it is quite contrary to 20 
the evidence on Joanna's trial. Southey's " Joan " of 
a. d. 1796 (Cottle, Bristol) tells the doctors, among 
other secrets, that she never in her life attended — 1st, 
Mass ; nor 2d, the Sacramental Table ; nor 3d, Con- 
fession. In the meantime, all this deistical confession 2 5 
of Joanna's, besides being suicidal for the interest 
of her cause, is opposed to the depositions upon both 
trials. The very best witness called from first to last 
deposes that Joanna attended these rites of her 
Church even too often ; was taxed with doing so ; 3<> 
and, by blushing, owned the charge as a fact, though 
certainly not as a fault. Joanna was a girl of natural 



JOAN OF ARC. 23 

piety, that saw God in forests and hills and foun- 
tains, but did not the less seek him in chapels and 
consecrated oratories. 

This peasant girl was self-educated through her 
5 own natural meditativeness. If the reader turns to 
that divine passage in " Paradise Regained " which 
Milton has put into the mouth of our Saviour when 
first entering the wilderness, and musing upon the 
tendency of those great impulses growing within him- 
10 self 

Oh, what a multitude of thoughts"at once 
Awakened in me swarm, while I consider 
What from within I feel myself, and hear 
What from without comes often to my ears, 

15 111 sorting with my present state compared ! 

When I was yet a child, no childish play 
To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do, 
What might be public good ; myself I thought 

20 Born to that end 

he will have some notion of the vast reveries which 
brooded over the heart of Joanna in early girlhood, 
when the wings were budding that should carry her 
from Orleans to Rheims ; when the golden chariot 

25 was dimly revealing itself that should carry her from 
the kingdom of France Delivered to the Eternal 
Kingdom. 

It is not requisite for the honor of Joanna, nor is 
there in this place room, to pursue her brief career 

3° of actio7i. That, though wonderful, forms the earthly 
part of her story ; the spiritual part is the saintly 
passion of her imprisonment, trial, and execution. It 
is unfortunate, therefore, for Southey's "Joan of 



24 DE QUINCE Y. 

Arc" (which, however, should always be regarded as 
a juvenile effort), that precisely when her real glory 
begins the poem ends. But this limitation of the 
interest grew, no doubt, from the constraint insep- 
arably attached to the law of epic unity. Joanna's 5 
history bisects into two opposite hemispheres, and 
both could not have been presented to the eye in one 
poem, unless by sacrificing all unity of theme, or else 
by involving the earlier half, as a narrative episode, 
in the latter ; which, however, might have been done, 10 
for it. might have been communicated to a fellow- 
prisoner, or a confessor, by Joanna herself. It is suffi- 
cient, as concerns this section of Joanna's life, to say 
that she fulfilled, to the height of her promises, the 
restoration of the prostrate throne. France had 15 
become a province of England, and for the ruin of 
both, if such a yoke could be maintained. Dreadful 
pecuniary exhaustion caused the English energy to 
droop ; and that critical opening La Pucelle used with 
a corresponding felicity of audacity and suddenness 20 
(that were in themselves portentous) for introducing 
the wedge of French native resources, for rekindling 
the national pride, and for planting the dauphin once 
more upon his feet. When Joanna appeared, he had 
been on the point of giving up the struggle with the 25 
English, distressed as they were, and of flying to the 
south of France. She taught him to blush for such 
abject counsels. She liberated Orleans, that great 
city, so decisive by its fate for the issue of the war, 
and then beleaguered by the English with an elabo- 30 
rate application of engineering skill unprecedented in 
Europe. Entering the city after sunset on the 29th 



JOAN OF ARC. 25 

of April, she sang mass on Sunday, May 8, for the 
entire disappearance of the besieging force. On the 
29th of June she fought and gained over the English 
the decisive battle of Patay ; on the 9th of July she 
5 took Troyes by a coup-de-main from a mixed garrison 
of English and Burgundians ; on the 15th of that 
month she carried the dauphin into Rheims ; on Sun- 
day the 17th she crowned him ; and there she rested 
from her labor of triumph. All that was to be done 

10 she had now accomplished ; what remained was — to 
suffer. 

All this forward movement was her own ; excepting 
one man, the whole council was against her. Her 
enemies were all that drew power from earth. Her 

15 supporters were her own strong enthusiasm, and the 
headlong contagion by which she carried this sublime 
frenzy into the hearts of women, of soldiers, and of 
all who lived by labor. Henceforward she was 
thwarted ; and the worst error that she committed 

20 was to lend the sanction of her presence to counsels 
which she had ceased to approve. But she had now 
accomplished the capital objects which her own visions 
had dictated. These involved all the rest. Errors 
were now less important ; and doubtless it had now 

25 become more difficult for herself to pronounce authen- 
tically what were errors. The noble girl had achieved, 
as by a rapture of motion, the capital end of clearing 
out a free space around her sovereign, giving him the 
power to move his arms with effect, and, secondly, 

30 the inappreciable end of winning for that sovereign 
what seemed to all France the heavenly ratification 
of his rights, by crowning him with the ancient 



26 DE QUINCE Y. 

solemnities. She had made it impossible for the 
English now to step before her. They were caught 
in an irretrievable blunder, owing partly to discord 
among the uncles of Henry VI., partly to a want of 
funds, but partly to the very impossibility which they 5 
believed to press with tenfold force upon any French 
attempt to forestall theirs. They laughed at such a 
thought ; and, while they laughed, she did it. Hence- 
forth the single redress for the English of this capital 
oversight, but which never could have redressed it 10 
effectually, was to vitiate and taint the coronation of 
Charles VII. as the work of a witch. That policy, 
and not malice (as M. Michelet is so happy to believe), 
was the moving principle in the subsequent prosecu- 
tion of Joanna. Unless they unhinged the force of 15 
the first coronation in the popular mind by associating 
it with power given from hell, they felt that the scepter 
of the invader was broken. 

But she, the child that at nineteen had wrought 
wonders so great for France, was she not elated? 20 
Did she not lose, as men so often have lost, all sobriety 
of mind when standing upon the pinnacle of success 
so giddy ? Let her enemies declare. During the 
progress of her movement, and in the center of fero- 
cious struggles, she had manifested the temper of 25 
her feelings by the pity which she had everywhere 
expressed for the suffering enemy. She forwarded to 
the English leaders a touching invitation to unite with 
the French, as brothers, in a common crusade against 
infidels — thus opening the road for a soldierly retreat. 30 
She interposed to protect the captive or the wounded ; 
she mourned over the excesses of her countrymen ; 



JOAN OF ARC. 27 

she threw herself off her horse to kneel by the dying 
English soldier, and to comfort him with such ministra- 
tions, physical or spiritual, as his situation allowed. 
" Nolebat," says the evidence, "uti ense suo, aut 
5quemquam interficere." She sheltered the English 
that invoked her aid in her own quarters. She wept 
as she beheld, stretched on the field of battle, so many 
brave enemies that had died without confession. 
And, as regarded herself, her elation expressed itself 

10 thus: on the day when she had finished her work, 
she wept ; for she knew that, when her triumphal task 
was done, her end must be approaching. Her aspira- 
tions pointed only to a place which seemed to her 
more than usually full of natural piety, as one in which 

15 it would give her pleasure to die. And she uttered, 
between smiles and tears, as a wish that inexpressibly 
fascinated her heart, and yet was half fantastic, a 
broken prayer that God would return her to the soli- 
tudes from which he had drawn her, and suffer her to 

20 become a shepherdess once more. It was a natural 
prayer, because nature has laid a necessity upon every 
human heart to seek for rest and to shrink from tor- 
ment. Yet, again, it was a half fantastic prayer, 
because, from childhood upward, visions that she 

25 had no power to mistrust, and the voices which 
sounded in her ear forever, had long since persuaded 
her mind that for her no such prayer could be granted. 
Too well she felt that her mission must be worked 
out to the end, and that the end was now at hand. 

30 All went wrong from this time. She herself had 
created the funds out of which the French restoration 
should grow ; but she was not suffered to witness 



28 DE QUINCE Y. 

their development or their prosperous application. 
More than one military plan was entered upon which 
she did not approve. But she still continued to expose 
her person as before. Severe wounds had not taught 
her caution. And at length, in a sortie from Com- 5 
piegne (whether through treacherous collusion on the 
part of her own friends is doubtful to this day), she 
was made prisoner by the Burgundians, and finally 
surrendered to the English. 

Now came her trial. This trial, moving of course 10 
under English influence, was conducted in chief by 
the Bishop of Beauvais. He was a Frenchman, sold 
to English interests, and hoping, by favor of the Eng- 
lish leaders, to reach the highest preferment. " Bishop 
that art, Archbishop that shalt be, Cardinal that may- 15 
est be," were the words that sounded continually in his 
ear ; and doubtless a whisper of visions still higher, of 
a triple crown, and feet upon the necks of kings, some- 
times stole into his heart. M. Michelet is anxious to 
keep us in mind that this bishop was but an agent of 20 
the English. True. But it does not better the case 
for his countryman that, being an accomplice in the 
crime, making himself the leader in the persecution 
against the helpless girl, he was willing to be all this 
in the spirit, and with the conscious vileness of a cat's- 25 
paw. Never from the foundations of the earth was 
there such a trial as this, if it were laid open in all its 
beauty of defense and all its hellishness of attack. 
Oh, child of France ! shepherdess, peasant girl ! 
trodden underfoot by all around thee, how I honor 30 
thy flashing intellect, quick as God's lightning, and 
true as God's lightning to its mark, that ran before 



JOAN OF ARC. 29 

France and laggard Europe by many a century, con- 
founding the malice of the ensnarer, and making dumb 
the oracles of falsehood ! Is it not scandalous, is it 
not humiliating to civilization, that, even at this day, 
5 France exhibits the horrid spectacle of judges examin- 
ing the prisoner against himself ; seducing him, by 
fraud, into treacherous conclusions against his own 
head ; using the terrors of their power for extorting 
confessions from the frailty of hope ; nay (which is 

10 worse), using the blandishments of condescension and 
snaky kindness for thawing into compliances of grati- 
tude those whom they had failed to freeze into terror ? 
Wicked judges ! barbarian jurisprudence ! — that, sit- 
ting in y(*ur own conceit on the summits of social 

15 wisdom, have yet failed to learn the first principles of 
criminal justice — sit ye humbly and with docility at the 
feet of this girl from Domremy, that tore your webs 
of cruelty into shreds and dust. " Would you examine 
me as a witness against myself ? " was the question by 

20 which many times she defied their arts. Continually 
she showed that their interrogations were irrelevant 
to any business before the court, or that entered into 
the ridiculous charges against her. General questions 
were proposed to her on points of casuistical divinity ; 

25 two-edged questions, which not one of themselves 
could have answered, without, on the one side, landing 
himself in heresy (as then interpreted), or, on the 
other, in some presumptuous expression of self-esteem. 
Next came a wretched Dominican, that pressed her 

30 with an objection, which, if applied to the Bible, would 
tax every one of its miracles with unsoundness. The 
monk had the excuse of never having read the Bible, 



3° DE QUINCE Y. 

M. Michelet has no such excuse ; and it makes one 
blush for him, as a philosopher, to find him describing 
such an argument as " weighty," whereas it is but a 
varied expression of rude Mohammedan metaphysics. 
Her answer to this, if there were room to place the 5 
whole in a clear light, was as shattering as it was 
rapid. Another thought to entrap her by asking what 
language the angelic visitors of her solitude had 
talked — as though heavenly counsels could want poly- 
glot interpreters for every word, or that God needed 10 
language at all in whispering thoughts to a human 
heart. Then came a worse devil, who asked her 
whether the Archangel Michael had appeared naked. 
Not comprehending the vile insinuation, Joarfna, whose 
poverty suggested to her simplicity that it might be 15 
the costliness of suitable robes which caused the demur, 
asked them if they fancied God, who clothed the 
flowers of the valleys, unable to find raiment for his 
servants. The answer of Joanna moves a smile of 
tenderness, but the disappointment of her judges 20 
makes one laugh exultingly. Others succeeded by 
troops, who upbraided her with leaving her father ; 
as if that greater Father, whom she believed herself 
to have been serving, did not retain the power of dis- 
pensing with his own rules, or had not said that for a 25 
less cause than martyrdom man and woman should 
leave both father and mother. 

On Easter Sunday, when the trial had been long 
proceeding, the poor girl fell so ill as to cause a belief 
that she had been poisoned. It was not poison. No- 30 
body had any interest in hastening a death so certain. 
M. Michelet, whose sympathies with all feelings are so 



JOAN OF ARC. 31 

quick that one would gladly see them always as justly 
directed, reads the case most truly. Joanna had a 
twofold malady. She was visited by a paroxysm of 
the complaint called honiesickness. The cruel nature 

5 of her imprisonment, and its length, could not but 
point her solitary thoughts, in darkness and in chains 
(for chained she was), to Domremy. And the season, 
which was the most heavenly period of the spring, 
added stings to this yearning. That was one of her 

10 maladies — nostalgia, as medicine calls it ; the other 
was weariness and exhaustion from daily combats 
with malice. She saw that everybody hated her and 
thirsted for her blood ; nay, many kind-hearted crea- 
tures that would have pitied her profoundly, as re- 

15 garded all political charges, had their natural feelings 
warped by the belief that she had dealings with fiend- 
ish powers. She knew she was to die ; that was not 
the misery ! the misery was that this consummation 
could not be reached without so much intermediate 

20 strife, as if she were contending for some chance 
(where chance was none) of happiness, or were dream- 
ing for a moment of escaping the inevitable. Why, 
then, did she contend ? Knowing that she would reap 
nothing from answering her persecutors, why did she 

25 not retire by silence from the superfluous contest ? 
It was because her quick and eager loyalty to truth 
would not suffer her to see it darkened by frauds 
which she could expose, but others, even of candid 
listeners, perhaps, could not ; it was through that im- 

30 perishable grandeur of soul which taught her to sub- 
mit meekly and without a struggle to her punishment, 
but taught her not to submit — no, not for a moment — 



32 BE QUINCE Y. 

to calumny as to facts, or to misconstruction as to 
motives. Besides, there were secretaries all around 
the court taking down her words. That was meant 
for no good to her. But the end does not always cor- 
respond to the meaning. And Joanna might say to 5 
herself, " These words that will be used against me 
to-morrow and the next day, perhaps, in some nobler 
generation, may rise again for my justification." Yes, 
Joanna, they are rising even now in Paris, and for 
more than justification ! IO 

Woman, sister, there are some things which you do 
not execute as well as your brother, man ; no, nor 
ever will. Pardon me if I doubt whether you will 
ever produce a great poet from your choirs, or a 
Mozart, or a Phidias, or a Michael Angelo, or a great 15 
philosopher, or a great scholar. By which last is 
meant — not one who depends simply on an infinite 
memory, but also on an infinite and electrical power 
of combination ; bringing together from the four 
winds, like the angel of the resurrection, what else 20 
were dust from dead men's bones, into the unity of 
breathing life. If you can create yourselves into any 
of these great creators, why have you not ? 

Yet, sister woman, though I cannot consent to find 
a Mozart or a Michael Angelo in your sex, cheerfully, 25 
and with the love that burns in depths of admiration, 
I acknowledge that you can do one thing as well as 
the best of us men — a greater thing than even Milton 
is known to have done, or Michael Angelo ; you can 
die grandly, and as goddesses would die, were god- 30 
desses mortal. If any distant worlds (which may be 
the case) are so far ahead of us Tellurians in optical 



JOAN OF ARC. 33 

resources as to see distinctly through their telescopes 
all that we do on earth, what is the grandest sight to 
which we ever treat them ? St. Peter's at Rome, do 
you fancy, on Easter Sunday, or Luxor, or perhaps 
5 the Himalayas ? Oh, no ! my friend ; suggest some- 
thing better ; these are baubles to them ; they see in 
other worlds, in their own, far better toys of the same 
kind. These, take my word for it, are nothing. Do 
you give it up ? The finest thing, then, we have to 

10 show them is a scaffold on the morning of execu- 
tion. I assure you there is a strong muster in those 
far telescopic worlds, on any such morning, of those 
who happen to find themselves occupying the right 
hemisphere for a peep at us. How, then, if it be an- 

15 nounced in some such telescopic world by those who 
make a livelihood of catching glimpses at our news- 
papers, whose language they have long since deci- 
phered, that the poor victim in the morning's sacrifice 
is a woman ? How, if it be published in that distant 

20 world that the sufferer wears upon her head, in the 
eyes of many, the garlands of martyrdom ? How, if it 
should be some Marie Antoinette, the widowed queen, 
coming forward on the scaffold, and presenting to the 
morning air her head, turned gray by sorrow — 

25 daughter of Caesars kneeling down humbly to kiss the 
guillotine, as one that worships death ? How, if it 
were the noble Charlotte Corday, that in the bloom of 
youth, that with the loveliest of persons, that with 
homage waiting upon her smiles wherever she turned 

30 her face to scatter them — homage that followed those 
smiles as surely as the carols of birds, after showers 
in spring, follow the reappearing sun and the racing 



34 DE QUINCE Y. 

of sunbeams over the hills — yet thought all these 
things cheaper than the dust upon her sandals, in 
comparison of deliverance from hell for her dear suf- 
fering France ! Ah ! these were spectacles indeed for 
those sympathizing people in distant worlds ; and 5 
some, perhaps, would suffer a sort of martyrdom 
themselves, because they could not testify their wrath, 
could not bear witness to the strength of love and to 
the fury of hatred that burned within them at such 
scenes, could not gather into golden urns some of 10 
that glorious dust which rested in the catacombs of 
earth. 

On the Wednesday after Trinity Sunday in 1431, 
being then about nineteen years of age, the Maid of 
Arc underwent her martyrdom. She was conducted 15 
before midday, guarded by eight hundred spearmen, 
to a platform of prodigious height, constructed of 
wooden billets supported by occasional walls of lath 
and plaster, and traversed by hollow spaces in every 
direction for the creation of air currents. The pile 20 
" struck terror," says M. Michelet, " by its height " ; 
and, as usual, the English purpose in this is viewed as 
one of pure malignity. But there are two ways of 
explaining all that. It is probable that the purpose 
was merciful. On the circumstances of the execution 25 
I shall not linger. Yet, to mark the almost fatal 
felicity of M. Michelet in finding out whatever may 
injure the English name, at a moment when every 
reader will be interested in Joanna's personal appear- 
ance, it is really edifying to notice the ingenuity by 30 
which he draws into light from a dark corner a very 
unjust account of it, and neglects, though lying upon 



/OAM OF ARC. 35 

the highroad, a very pleasing one. Both are from 
English pens. Grafton, a chronicler, but little read, 
being a stiffnecked John Bull, thought fit to say that 
no wonder Joanna should be a virgin, since her " foule 
5 face " was a satisfactory solution of that particular 
merit. Holinshead, on the other hand, a chronicler 
somewhat later, every way more important, and at one 
time universally read, has given a very pleasing testi- 
mony to the interesting character of Joanna's person 

ioand engaging manners. Neither of these men lived 
till the following century, so that personally this evi- 
dence is none at all. Grafton sullenly and carelessly 
believed as he wished to believe ; Holinshead took 
pains to inquire, and reports undoubtedly the general 

15 impression of France. But I cite the case as illustrat- 
ing M. Michelet's candor.* 

* Amongst the many ebullitions of M. Michelet's fury against 
us poor English are four which will be likely to amuse the reader; 
and they are the more conspicuous in collision with the justice 

20 which he sometimes does us, and the very indignant admiration 
which, under some aspects, he grants to us. 

1. Our English literature he admires with some gnashing 
of teeth. He pronounces it "fine and somber," but, I lament 
to add, " skeptical, Judaic, Satanic — in a word, antichristian." 

25 That Lord Byron should figure as a member of this diabolical cor- 
poration will not surprise men. It will surprise them to hear that 
Milton is one of its Satanic leaders. Many are the generous and 
eloquent Frenchmen, besides Chateaubriand, who have, in the 
course of the last thirty years, nobly suspended their own burning 

30 nationality, in order to render a more rapturous homage at the 
feet of Milton ; and some of them have raised Milton almost to a 
level with angelic natures. Not one of them has thought of look- 
ing for him below the earth. As to Shakspere, M. Michelet 
detects in him a most extraordinary mare's nest. It is this : he 



3 6 DE QUINCEY. 

The circumstantial incidents of the execution, unless 
with more space than I can now command, I should 
be unwilling to relate. I should fear to injure, by 
imperfect report, a martyrdom which to myself appears 

does ' ' not recollect to have seen the name of God " in any part of 5 
his works. On reading such words, it is natural to rub one's eyes, 
and suspect that all one has ever s^ en in this world may have 
been a pure ocular delusion. In particular, I begin myself to sus- 
pect that the word "la gloire" never occurs in any Parisian 
journal. " The great English nation," says M. Michelet, " has 10 
one immense profound vice" — to wit, " pride." Why, really, 
that may be true ; but we have a neighbor not absolutely clear of 
an " immense profound vice," as like ours in color and shape as 
cherry to cherry. In short, M. Michelet thinks us, by fits and 
starts, admirable — only that we are detestable ; and he would 15 
adore some of our authors, were it not that so intensely he could 
have wished to kick them. 

2. M. Michelet thinks to lodge an arrow in our sides by a very 
odd remark upon Thomas a Kempis : which is, that a man of any 
conceivable European blood — a Finlander, suppose, or a Zan- 20 
tiote — might have written Tom ; only not an Englishman. 
Whether an Englishman could have forged Tom must remain a 
matter of doubt, unless the thing had been tried long ago. That 
problem was intercepted forever by Tom's perverseness in choos- 
ing to manufacture himself. Yet, since nobody is better aware 25 
than M. Michelet that this very point of Kempis having manu- 
factured Kempis is furiously and hopelessly litigated, three or four 
nations claiming to have forged his work for him, the shocking 
old doubt will raise its snaky head once more — whether this forger, 
who rests in so much darkness, might not, after all, be of English 30 
blood. Tom, it may be feared, is known to modern English litera- 
ture chiefly by an irreverent mention of his name in a line of Peter 
Pindar's (Dr. Wolcot) fifty years back, where he is described as 

Kempis Tom, 
Who clearly shows the way to Kingdom Come. ge 

Few in these days can have read him, unless in the Methodist 



JOAN OF ARC. 37 

so unspeakably grand. Yet, for a purpose, pointing 
not at Joanna, but at M. Michelet — viz., to convince 
him that an Englishman is capable of thinking more 
highly of La Pucelle than even her admiring country- 

5 version of John Wesley. Among those few, however, happens to 
be myself ; which arose from the accident of having, when a boy 
of eleven, received a copy of the " De Imitatione Christi " as a 
bequest from a relation who died very young ; from which cause, 
and from the external prettiness of the book — being a Glasgow 

io reprint by the celebrated Foulis, and gayly bound — I was induced 
to look into it, and finally read it many times over, partly out of 
some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with its simplic- 
ity and devotional fevor, but much more from the savage delight 
I found in laughing at Tom's Latinity. That, I freely grant to 

15 M. Michelet, is inimitable. Yet, after all.it is not certain whether 
the original was Latin. But, however that may have been, if it is 
possible that M. Michelet* can be accurate in saying that there 
are no less than sixty French versions (not editions, observe, but 
separate versions) existing of the " De Imitatione," how prodi- 

20 gious must have been the adaptation of the book to the religious 
heart of the fifteenth century ! Excepting the Bible, but excepting 
that only in Protestant lands, no book known to man has had the 
same distinction. It is the most marvelous bibliographical fact 
on record. 

25 3. Our English girls, it seems, are as faulty in one way as we 
English males in another. None of us men could have written 
the Opera Omnia of Mr. a Kempis ; neither could any of our girls 

* " If M. Michelet can be accurate.'' 1 — However, on consideration, this 
statement does not depend on Michelet. The bibliographer Barbier has abso- 

30 lutely specified sixty in a separate dissertation, soixante traductions, among 
those even that have not escaped the search. The Italian translations are said 
to be thirty. As to mere editions, not counting the early MSS. for half a cen- 
tury before printing was introduced, those in Latin amount to 2000, and those 
in French to 1000. Meantime, it is very clear to me that this astonishing popu- 

35 larity, so entirely unparalleled in literature, could not have existed except in 
Roman Catholic times, nor subsequently have lingered in any Protestant land. 
It was the denial of Scripture fountains to thirsty lands which made this 
slender rill of Scripture truth so passionately welcome. 



3 8 DE QUINCE V. 

men — I shall, in parting, allude to one or two traits 
in Joanna's demeanor on the scaffold, and to one or 
two in that of the bystanders, which authorize me in 
questioning an opinion of his upon this martyr's firm- 
have assumed male attire like La Pucelle. But why ? Because, 5 
says Michelet, English girls and German think so much of an 
indecorum. Well, that is a good fault, generally speaking. But 
M. Michelet ought to have remembered a fact in the martryrol- 
ogies which justifies both parties — the French heroine for doing, 
and the general choir of English girls for not doing. A female 10 
saint, specially renowned in France, had, for a reason as weighty 
as Joanna's — viz., expressly to shie'ld her modesty among men — 
worn a male military harness. That reason and that example 
authorized La Pucelle ; but our English girls, as a body, have 
seldom any such reason, and certainly no such saintly example, to 15 
plead. This excuses them. Yet, still, if it is indispensable to the 
national character that our young women should now and then 
trespass over the frontier of decorum, it then becomes a patriotic 
duty in me to assure M. Michelet that we have such ardent females 
among us, and in a long series ; some detected in naval hospitals 20 
when too sick to remember their disguise ; some on fields of 
battle ; multitudes never detected at all ; some only suspected ; 
and others discharged without noise by war offices and other 
absurd people. In our navy, both royal and commercial, and 
generally from deep remembrances of slighted love, women have 25 
sometimes served in disguise for many years, taking contentedly 
their daily allowance of burgoo, biscuit, or cannon-balls — any- 
thing, in short, digestible or indigestible, that it might please 
Providence to send. One thing, at least, is to their credit : never 
any of these poor masks, with their deep silent remembrances, 30 
have been detected through murmuring, or what is nautically 
understood by " skulking." So, for once, M. Michelet has an 
errattim to enter upon the fly-leaf of his book in presentation 
copies. 

4. But the last of these ebullitions is the most lively. We 35 
English, at Orleans, and after Orleans (which is not quite so 



JOAN OF ARC. 39 

ness. The reader ought to be reminded that Joanna 
D'Arc was subjected to an unusually unfair trial of 
opinion. Any of the elder Christian martyrs had not 
much to fear of personal rancor. The martyr was 
5 chiefly regarded as the enemy of Caesar ; at times, 
also, where any knowledge of the Christian faith and 

extraordinary, if all were told), fled before the Maid of Arc. Yes, 
says M. Michelet, you did : deny it, if you can. Deny it, mon 
chef? I don't mean to deny it. Running away, in many cases, 

iois a thing so excellent that no philosopher would, at times, con- 
descend to adopt any other step. All of us nations in Europe, 
without one exception, have shown our philosophy in that way at 
times. Even people "qui ne se rendent pas" have deigned both 
to run and to shout " Sauve qui pent ! " at odd times of sunset ; 

15 though, for my part, I have no pleasure in recalling unpleasant 
remembrances to brave men ; and yet, really, being so philosophic, 
they ought not to be unpleasant. But the amusing feature in 
M. Michelet's reproach is the way in which he improves and varies 
against us the charge of running, as if he were singing a catch. 

20 Listen to him: They "showed their backs" did these English; 
(Hip, hip, hurrah ! three times three !) " Behind good walls they 
let themselves be taken." (Hip, hip ! nine times nine !) They 
" ran as fast as their legs could carry them." (Hurrah ! twenty- 
seven times twenty-seven !) They " ran before a girl" ; they did. 

25 (Hurrah ! eighty-one times eighty-one !) This reminds one of 
criminal indictments on the old model in English courts, where 
(for fear the prisoner should escape) the crown lawyer varied the 
charge perhaps through forty counts. The law laid its guns so as 
to rake the accused at every possible angle. While the indict- 

30 ment was reading, he seemed a monster of crime in his own eyes ; 
and yet, after all, the poor fellow had but committed one offense, 
and not always that. N. B. — Not having the French original at 
hand, I make my quotations from a friend's copy of Mr. Walter 
Kelly's translation ; which seems to me faithful, spirited, and 

35 idiomatically English — liable, in fact, only to the single reproach 
of occasional provincialisms. 



40 DE QUINCE Y. 

morals existed, with the enmity that arises spontane- 
ously in the worldly against the spiritual. But the 
martyr, though disloyal, was not supposed to be there- 
fore anti-national ; and still less was individually hate- 
ful. What was hated (if anything) belonged to his 5 
class, not to himself separately. Now, Joanna, if 
hated at all, was hated personally, and in Rouen on 
national grounds. Hence there would be a certainty 
of calumny arising against her such as would not 
affect martyrs in general. That being the case, it 10 
would follow of necessity that some people would 
impute to her a willingness to recant. No innocence 
could escape that. Now, had she really testified this 
willingness on the scaffold, it would have argued noth- 
ing at all but the weakness of a genial nature shrink- 15 
ing from the instant approach of torment. And those 
will often pity that weakness most who, in their own 
persons, would yield to it least. Meantime, there 
never was a calumny uttered that drew less support 
from the recorded circumstances. It rests upon 11020 
positive testimony, and it has a weight of contradict- 
ing testimony to stem. And yet, strange to say, 
M. Michelet, who at times seems to admire the Maid of 
Arc as much as I do, is the one sole writer among her 
friends who lends some countenance to this odious 25 
slander. His words are that, if she did not utter this 
word recant with her lips, she uttered it in her heart. 
" Whether she said the word is uncertain ; but I affirm 
that she thought it." 

Now, I affirm that she did not ; not in any sense of 30 
the word " thought " applicable to the case. Here is 
France calumniating La Pucelle ; here is England de- 



JOAN OF ARC. 4 1 

fending her. M. Michelet can only mean that, on a 
priori principles, every woman must be presumed 
liable to such a weakness ; that Joanna was a woman; 
ergo, that she was liable to such a weakness. That is, 

5 he only supposes her to have uttered the word by an 
argument which presumes it impossible for anybody 
to have done otherwise. I, on the contrary, throw 
the onus of the argument not on presumable tenden- 
cies of nature, but on the known facts of that morn- 

10 ing's execution, as recorded by multitudes. What 
else, I demand, than mere weight of metal, absolute 
nobility of deportment, broke the vast line of battle 
then arrayed against her ? What else but her meek, 
saintly demeanor won, from the enemies that till now 

15 had believed her a witch, tears of rapturous admira- 
tion ? " Ten thousand men," says M. Michelet him- 
self— " ten thousand men wept"; and of these ten 
thousand the majority were political enemies knitted 
together by cords of superstition. What else was it 

20 but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, 
that drove the fanatic English soldier — who had 
sworn to throw a faggot on her scaffold as his tribute 
of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow — sud- 
denly to turn away a penitent for life, saying every- 

25 where that he had seen a dove rising upon wings to 
heaven from the ashes where she had stood ? What 
else drove the executioner to kneel at every shrine for 
pardon to his share in the tragedy ? And, if all this 
were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life 

30 as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies 
against her. The executioner had been directed to 
apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery 



42 BE QUINCE Y. 

smoke rose upward in billowing volumes. A Domini- 
can monk was then standing almost at her side. 
Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the 
danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, 
when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs 5 
to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest of 
girls think only for /ii'm, the one friend that would not 
forsake her, and not for herself ; bidding him with her 
last breath to care for his own preservation, but to 
leave her to God. That girl, whose latest breath 10 
ascended in this sublime expression of self-oblivion, 
did not utter the word recant either with her lips or in 
her heart. No ; she did not, though one should rise 
from the dead to swear it. 

Bishop of Beauvais ! thy victim died in fire upon a 15 
scaffold — thou upon a down bed. But, for the depart- 
ing minutes of life, both are oftentimes alike. At the 
farewell crisis, when the gates of death are opening, 
and flesh is resting from its struggles, oftentimes the 
tortured and the torturer have the same truce from 20 
carnal torment ; both sink together into sleep ; to- 
gether both sometimes kindle into dreams. When 
the mortal mists were gathering fast upon you two, 
bishop and shepherd girl — when the pavilions of life 
were closing up their shadowy curtains about you — let 25 
us try, through the gigantic glooms, to decipher the 
flying features of your separate visions. 

The shepherd girl that had delivered France — she, 
from her dungeon, she, from her baiting at the stake, 
she, from her duel with fire, as she entered her last 30 
dream — saw Domremy, saw the fountain of Domremy, 



JOAN OF ARC. 43 

saw the pomp of forests in which her childhood had 
wandered. That Easter festival which man had de- 
nied to her languishing heart — that resurrection of 
springtime, which the darkness of dungeons had 

5 intercepted from her, hungering after the glorious 
liberty of forests — were by God given back into her 
hands as jewels that had been stolen from her by 
robbers. With those, perhaps (for the minutes of 
dreams can stretch into ages), was given back to her 

io by God the bliss of childhood. By special privilege 
for her might be created, in this farewell dream, a 
second childhood, innocent as the first ; but not, like 
that, sad with the gloom of a fearful mission in the 
rear. This mission had now been fulfilled. The 

15 storm was weathered ; the skirts even of that mighty 
storm were drawing off. The blood that she was to 
reckon for had been exacted ; the tears that she was 
to shed in secret had been paid to the last. The 
hatred to herself in all eyes had been faced steadily, 

2ohad been suffered, had been survived. And in her 
last fight upon the scaffold she had triumphed glori- 
ously ; victoriously she had tasted the stings of death. 
For all, except this comfort from her farewell dream, 
she had died — died amid the tears of ten thousand 

25 enemies — died amid the drums and trumpets of 
armies — died amid peals redoubling upon peals, 
volleys upon volleys, from the saluting clarions of 
martyrs. 

Bishop of Beauvais! because the guilt-burdened man 

30 is in dreams haunted and waylaid by the most frightful 
of his crimes, and because upon that fluctuating mir- 
ror — rising (like the mocking mirrors of mirage in Arab- 



44 DE QUINCE Y. 

ian deserts) from the fens of death — most of all are 
reflected the sweet countenances which the man has laid 
in ruins; therefore I know, bishop, that you also, enter- 
ing your final dream, saw Domremy. That fountain, 
of which the witnesses spoke so much, showed itself to 5 
your eyes in pure morning dews ; but neither dews, nor 
the holy dawn, could cleanse away the bright spots of 
innocent blood upon its surface. By the fountain, 
bishop, you saw a woman seated, that hid her face. 
But, as you draw near, the woman raises her wasted 10 
features. Would Domremy know them again for the 
features of her child ? Ah, but you know them, bishop, 
well ! Oh, mercy ! what a groan was that which the 
servants, waiting outside the bishop's dream at his 
bedside, heard from his laboring heart, as at this 15 
moment he turned away from the fountain and the 
woman, seeking rest in the forests afar off. Yet not 
so to escape the woman, whom once again he must 
behold before he dies. In the forests to which he 
prays for pity, will he find a respite ? What a tumult, 20 
what a gathering of feet is there ! In glades where 
only wild deer should run armies and nations are 
assembling ; towering in the fluctuating crowd are 
phantoms that belong to departed hours. There is 
the great English Prince, Regent of France. There 25 
is my Lord of Winchester, the princely cardinal, that 
died and made no sign. There is the Bishop of 
Beauvais, clinging to the shelter of thickets. What 
building is that which hands so rapid are raising ? Is 
it a martyr's scaffold? Will they burn the child of 30 
Domremy a second time ? No ; it is a tribunal that 
rises to the clouds ; and two nations stand around it, 



JOAN OF ARC. 45 

waiting for a trial. Shall my Lord of Beauvais sit 
again upon the judgment-seat, and again number the 
hours for the innocent ? Ah, no ! he is the prisoner 
at the bar. Already all is waiting : the mighty audi- 
5 ence is gathered, the Court is hurrying to their seats, 
the witnesses are arrayed, the trumpets are sounding, 
the judge is taking his place. Oh, but this is sudden ! 
My lord, have you no counsel ? " Counsel I have 
none ; in heaven above, or on earth beneath, counselor 

io there is none now that would take a brief from me : 
all are silent." Is it, indeed, come to this ? Alas ! 
the time is short, the tumult is wondrous, the crowd 
stretches away into infinity ; but yet I will search in 
it for somebody to take your brief ; I know of some- 

15 body that will be your counsel. Who is this that 
cometh from Domremy ? Who is she in bloody coro- 
nation robes from Rheims ? Who is she that cometh 
with blackened flesh from walking the furnaces of 
Rouen ? This is she, the shepherd girl, counselor 

20 that had none for herself, whom I choose, bishop, for 
yours. She it is, I engage, that shall take my lord's 
brief. She it is, bishop, that would plead for you ; 
yes, bishop, she — when heaven and earth are silent. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 



Section I — The Glory of Motion. 

Some twenty or more years before I matriculated 
at Oxford, Mr. Palmer, at that time M. P. for Bath, 
had accomplished two things, very hard to do on our 
little planet, the earth, however cheap they may be 
held by eccentric people in comets ; he had invented 5 
mail coaches, and he had married the daughter of a 
duke.* He was, therefore, just twice as great a man 
as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the 
same thing, f discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those 
very next things extant to mail coaches in the two 10 
capital pretensions of speed and keeping time, but, 
on the other hand, who did not marry the daughter of 
a duke. 

These mail coaches, as organized by Mr. Palmer, 
are entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself, 15 
having had so large a share in developing the an- 
archies of my subsequent dreams; an agency which 
they accomplished, 1st, through velocity at that time 
unprecedented — for they first revealed the glory of 

*Lady Madeline Gordon. 2<? 

f " The same thing." — Thus, in the calendar of the Church 
Festivals, the discovery of the true cross (by Helen, the mother of 
Constantine) is recorded (and, one might think, with the express 
consciousness of sarcasm) as the Invention of the Cross. 

46 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 47 

motion ; 2d, through grand effects for the eye 
between lamplight and the darkness upon solitary 
roads ; 3d, through animal beauty and power so often 
displayed in the class of horses selected for this mail 
5 service ; 4th, through the conscious presence of a 
central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances * — 
of storms, of darkness, of danger — overruled all 
obstacles into one steady co-operation to a national 
result. For my own feeling, this post-office service 

10 spoke as by some mighty orchestra, where a thousand 
instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in 
danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the 
supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a 
perfection of harmony like that of heart, brain, and 

15 lungs in a healthy animal organization. But, finally, 
that particular element in this whole combination 
which most impressed myself, and through which it 
is that to this hour Mr. Palmer's mail-coach system 
tyrannizes over my dreams by terror and terrific 

20 beauty, lay in the awful political mission which at that 
time it fulfilled. The mail coach it was that distrib- 
uted over the face of the land, like the opening of 
apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news of Trafalgar, 
of Salamanca, of Vittoria, of Waterloo. These were 

25 the harvests that, in the grandeur of their reaping, 
redeemed the tears and blood in which they had been 
sown. Neither was the meanest peasant so much 

* " Vast distances.'" — One case was familiar to mail-coach 

travelers where two mails in opposite directions, north and south, 

30 starting at the same minute from points six hundred miles apart, 

met almost constantly at a particular bridge which bisected the 

total distance. 



48 DE QUINCE V. 

below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times as to 
confound battles such as these, which were gradually 
molding the destinies of Christendom, with the vul- 
gar conflicts of ordinary warfare, so often no more 
than gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The 5 
victories of England in this stupendous contest rose 
of themselves as natural " Te Deums " to heaven ; and 
it was felt by the thoughtful that such victories, at 
such a crisis of general prostration, were not more 
beneficial to ourselves than finally to France, our 10 
enemy, and to the nations of all western or central 
Europe, through whose pusillanimity it was that the 
French domination had prospered. 

The mail coach, as the national organ for publish- 
ing these mighty events, thus diffusively influential, 15 
became itself a spiritualized and glorified object to an 
impassioned heart ; and naturally, in the Oxford of 
that day, all hearts were impassioned, as being all (or 
nearly all) in early manhood. In most universities 
there is one single college ; in Oxford there were five- 20 
and-twenty, all of which were peopled by young men, 
the tlite of their own generation ; not boys, but men ; 
none under eighteen. In some of these many colleges 
the custom permitted the student to keep what are 
called "short terms"; that is, the four terms of 25 
Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept by a 
residence, in the aggregate, of ninety-one days, or 
thirteen weeks. Under this interrupted residence, it 
was possible that a student might have a reason for 
going down to his home four times in the year. This 30 
made eight journeys to and fro. But, as these homes 
lay dispersed through all the shires of the island, and 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 49 

most of us disdained all coaches except his majesty's 
mail, no city out of London could pretend to so exten- 
sive a connection with Mr. Palmer's establishment as 
Oxford. Three mails, at the least, I remember as pass- 
5 ing every day through Oxford, and benefiting by my 
personal patronage — viz., the Worcester, the Glouces- 
ter, and the Holyhead mail. Naturally, therefore, it 
became a point of some interest with us, whose jour- 
neys revolved every six weeks on an average, to look 

ioa little into the executive details of the system. With 
some of these Mr. Palmer had no concern ; they rested 
upon by-laws enacted by posting houses for their own 
benefit, and upon other by-laws, equally stern, enacted 
by the inside passengers for the illustration of their 

15 own haughty exclusiveness. These last were of a 
nature to rouse our scorn ; from which the transition 
was not very long to systematic mutiny. Up to this 
time, say 1804, or 1805 (the year of Trafalgar), it had 
been the fixed assumption of the four inside people 

20 (as an old tradition of all public carriages derived from 
the reign of Charles II.) that they, the illustrious qua- 
ternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human 
race, whose dignity would have been compromised by 
exchanging one word of civility with the three misera- 

25 ble delftware outside. Even to have kicked an out- 
sider might have been held to attaint the foot con- 
cerned in that operation, so that, perhaps, it would 
have required an Act of Parliament to restore its 
purity of blood. What words, then, could express the 

30 horror, and the sense of treason, in that case which 
had happened, where all three outsides (the trinity of 
Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at the same 



5© DE QUINCE V. 

breakfast table or dinner table with the consecrated 
four ? I myself witnessed such an attempt ; and on 
that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavored 
to soothe his three holy associates by suggesting that, 
if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt 5 
at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case 
of lunacy or delirium tremens rather than of treason. 
England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of 
the aristocratic element in her social composition, 
when pulling against her strong democracy. I am 10 
not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubt- 
edly, it expressed itself in comic shapes. The course 
taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular 
attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter, 
beckoning them away from the privileged salle a 15 
manger, sang out, " This way, my good men," and 
then enticed these good men away to the kitchen. 
But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, 
though rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, 
being stronger than usual, or more vicious than usual, 20 
resolutely refused to budge, and so far carried their 
point as to have a separate table arranged for them- 
selves in a corner of the general room. Yet, if an 
Indian screen could be found ample enough to plant 
them out from the very eyes of the high table, or dais, 25 
it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law 
that the three delft fellows, after all, were not present. 
They could be ignored by the porcelain men, under the 
maxim that objects not appearing and objects not ex- 
isting are governed by the same logical construction.* 30 
Such being at that time the usage of mail coaches, 
* De non apparentibus, etc. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 51 

what was to be done by us of young Oxford ? We, 
the most aristocratic of people, who were addicted to 
the practice of looking down superciliously even upon 
the insides themselves as often very questionable char- 

5 acters — were we, by voluntarily going outside, to court 
indignities ? If our dress and bearing sheltered us 
generally from the suspicion of being " raff "(the 
name at that period for " snobs" *), we really were 
such constructively by the place we assumed. If we 

10 did not submit to the deep shadow of eclipse, we 
entered at least the skirts of its penumbra. And the 
analogy of theaters was valid against us — where no 
man can complain of the annoyances incident to the 
pit or gallery, having his instant remedy in paying 

15 the higher price of the boxes. But the soundness of 
this analogy we disputed. In the case of the theater, 
it cannot be pretended that the inferior situations have 
any separate attractions, unless the pit may be sup- 
posed to have an advantage for the purposes of the 

20 critic or the dramatic reporter. But the critic or 
reporter is a rarity. For most people, the sole bene- 
fit is in the price. Now, on the contrary, the outside 
of the mail had its own incommunicable advantages. 
These we could not forego. The higher price we 

25 would willingly have paid, but not the price connected 
with the condition of riding inside ; which condition 
we pronounced insufferable. The air, the freedom of 

* " Snobs" and its antithesis, " nobs" arose among the internal 

30 factions of shoemakers perhaps ten years later. Possibly enough, 

the terms may have existed much earlier ; but they were then first 

made known, picturesquely and effectively, by a trial at some 

assizes which happened to fix the public attention. 



52 DE QUINCE Y. 

prospect, the proximity to the horses, the elevation of 
seat ; these were what we required ; but, above all, 
the certain anticipation of purchasing occasional 
opportunities of driving. 

Such was the difficulty which pressed us ; and 5 
under the coercion of this difficulty we instituted a 
searching inquiry into the true quality and valuation 
of the different apartments about the mail. We con- 
ducted this inquiry on metaphysical principles ; and 
it was ascertained satisfactorily that the roof of the 10 
coach, which by some weak men had been called the 
attics, and by some the garrets, was in reality the 
drawing room ; in which drawing room the box was 
the chief ottoman or sofa ; while it appeared that the 
inside, which had been traditionally regarded as the 15 
only room tenantable by gentlemen, was, in fact, the 
coal cellar in disguise. 

Great wits jump. The very same idea had not 
long before struck the celestial intellect of China. 
Among the presents carried out by our first embassy 20 
to that country was a state coach. It had been spe- 
cially selected as a personal gift by George III.; but 
the exact mode of using it was an intense mystery to 
Pekin. The ambassador, indeed (Lord Macartney), 
had made some imperfect explanations upon this 25 
point ; but, as His Excellency communicated these in 
a diplomatic whisper at the very moment of his de- 
parture, the celestial intellect was very feebly illumi- 
nated, and it became necessary to call a cabinet 
council on the grand state question, "Where was the 30 
Emperor to sit ? " The hammer cloth happened to 
be unusually gorgeous ; and, partly on that consider- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 53 

ation, but partly also because the box offered the 
most elevated seat, was nearest to the moon, and un- 
deniably went foremost, it was resolved by acclama- 
tion that the box was the imperial throne, and, for 
5 the scoundrel who drove — he might sit where he 
could find a perch. The horses, therefore, being 
harnessed, solemnly his imperial majesty ascended 
his new English throne under a flourish of trumpets, 
having the first lord of the treasury on his right hand, 

ioand the chief jester on his left. Pekin gloried in the 
spectacle ; and in the whole flowery people, con- 
structively present by representation, there was but 
one discontented person, and that was the coachman. 
This mutinous individual audaciously shouted, 

15 " Where am / to sit ? " But the privy council, in- 
censed by his disloyalty, unaminously opened the 
door and kicked him into the inside. He had all the 
inside place to himself ; but such is the rapacity of 
ambition that he was still dissatisfied. " I say," he 

20 cried out in an extempore petition addressed to the 
emperor through the window — " I say, how am I to 
catch hold of the reins ? " — " Anyhow," was the im- 
perial answer ; " don't trouble me y man, in my glory. 
How catch the reins ? Why, through the windows, 

25 through the keyholes — anyhow." Finally this contu- 
macious coachman lengthened the check-strings into 
a sort of jury-reins communicating with the horses ; 
with these he drove as steadily as Pekin had any right 
to expect. The emperor returned after the briefest of 

30 circuits ; he descended in great pomp from his throne, 
with the severest resolution never to remount it. A 
public thanksgiving was ordered for his majesty's 



54 DE QUINCE V. 

happy escape from the disease of broken neck ; and 
the state coach was dedicated thenceforward as a 
votive offering to the god Fo Fo — whom the learned 
more accurately called Fi Fi. 

A revolution of this same Chinese character did 5 
young Oxford of that era effect in the constitution of 
mail-coach society. It was a perfect French Revolu- 
tion ; and we had good reason to say, fa ira. In 
fact, it soon became too popular. The " public " — 
a well-known character, particularly disagreeable, 10 
though slightly respectable, and notorious for affect- 
ing the chief seats in synagogues — had at first loudly 
opposed this revolution ; but, when the opposition 
showed itself to be ineffectual, our disagreeable friend 
went into it with headlong zeal. At first it was a sort 15 
of race between us ; and, as the public is usually 
from thirty to fifty years old, naturally we of young 
Oxford, that averaged about twenty, had the advan- 
tage. Then the public took to bribing, giving fees 
to horsekeepers, etc., who hired out their persons as 20 
warming pans on the box seat. T/iat, you know, was 
shocking to all moral sensibilities. Come to bribery, 
said we, and there is an end to all morality — Aris- 
totle's, Zeno's, Cicero's, or anybody's. And, besides, 
of what use was it? For we bribed also. And, as 25 
our bribes, to those of the public, were as five shillings 
to sixpence, here again young Oxford had the advan- 
tage. But the contest was ruinous to the principles 
of the stables connected with the mails. This whole 
corporation was constantly bribed, rebribed, and often 30 
sur-rebribed ; a mail-coach yard was like the hustings 
in a contested election ; and a horsekeeper, ostler, 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 55 

or helper, was held by the philosophical at that time 
to be the most corrupt character in the nation. 

There was an impression upon the public mind, 
natural enough from the continually augmenting 
5 velocity of the mail, but quite erroneous, that an 
outside seat on this class of carriages was a post of 
danger. On the contrary, I maintained that, if a man 
had become nervous from some gypsy prediction in 
his childhood, allocating to a particular moon, now 

10 approaching, some unknown danger, and he should 
inquire earnestly, " Whither can I fly for shelter ? Is 
a prison the safest retreat ? or a lunatic hospital ? or 
the British Museum ? " I should have replied, " Oh, 
no ; I'll tell you what to do. Take lodgings for the 

15 next forty days on the box of his majesty's mail. 
Nobody can touch you there. If it is by bills at 
ninety days after date that you are made unhappy — 
if noters and protesters are the sort of wretches whose 
astrological shadows darken the house of life — then 

20 note you what I vehemently protest, viz., that no 
matter though the sheriff and under-sheriff in every 
county should be running after you with his posse, 
touch a hair of your head he cannot while you keep 
house and have your legal domicil on the box of the 

25 mail. It is felony to stop the mail ; even the sheriff 
cannot do that. And an extra touch of the whip to 
the leaders (no great matter if it grazes the sheriff) at 
any time guarantees your safety." In fact, a bedroom 
in a quiet house seems a safe enough retreat ; yet it 

30 is liable to its own notorious nuisances — to robbers by 
night, to rats, to fire. But the mail laughs at these 
terrors. To robbers, the answer is packed up and 



56 DE QUINCE Y. 

ready for delivery in the barrel of the guard's blun- 
derbuss. Rats, again ! there are none about mail- 
coaches, any more than snakes in Von Troil's Iceland*; 
except, indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who 
always hides his shame in what I have shown to be 5 
the " coal cellar." And, as to fire, I never knew but 
one in a mail coach ; which was in the Exeter mail, 
and caused by an obstinate sailor bound to Devon- 
port. Jack, making light of the law and the lawgiver 
that had set their faces against his offense, insisted on 10 
taking up a forbidden seat f in the rear of the roof, 

*"Von Troil's Iceland." — The allusion is to a well-known 
chapter in Von Troil's work, entitled, " Concerning the Snakes of 
Iceland." The entire chapter consists of these six words — 
" There are no snakes in Iceland" 15 

\ "Forbidden Seat." — The very sternest code of rules was 
enforced upon the mails by the Post Office. Throughout Eng- 
land, only three outsides were allowed, of whom one was to sit 
on the box, and the other two immediately behind the box ; none, 
under any pretext, to come near the guard ; an indispensable 20 
caution ; since else, under the guise of a passenger, a robber 
might by any one of a thousand advantages — which sometimes 
are created, but always are favored, by the animation of frank 
social intercourse — have disarmed the guard. Beyond the Scottish 
border, the regulation was so far relaxed as to allow four outsides, 25 
but not relaxed at all as to the mode of placing them. One, as 
before, was seated on the box, and the other three on the front of 
the roof, with a determinate and ample separation from the little 
insulated chair of the guard. This relaxation was conceded by 
way of compensating to Scotland her disadvantages in point of 3° 
population. England, by the superior density of her population, 
might always count upon a large fund of profits in the fractional 
trips of chance passengers riding for short distances of two or 
three stages. In Scotland this chance counted for much less. 
And therefore, to make good the deficiency, Scotland was allowed 35 
a compensatory profit upon one extra passenger. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 57 

from which he could exchange his own yarns with 
those of the guard. No greater offense was then 
known to mail coaches ; it was treason, it was Icesa 
majestas, it was by tendency arson ; and the ashes of 
5 Jack's pipe, falling among the straw of the hinder 
boot, containing the mailbags, raised a flame which 
(aided by the wind of our motion) threatened a revolu- 
tion in the republic of letters. Yet even this left the 
sanctity of the box unviolated. In dignified repose, the 
10 coachman and myself sat on, resting with benign com- 
posure upon our knowledge that the fire would have 
to burn its way through four inside passengers before 
it could reach ourselves. I remarked to the coach- 
man, with a quotation from Virgil's ^Eneid really too 

15 hackneyed : 

Jam proximus ardet 
Ucalegon. 

But, recollecting that the Virgilian part of the coach- 
man's education might have been neglected, I inter- 

20 preted so far as to say that perhaps at that moment 
the flames were catching hold of our worthy brother 
and inside passenger, Ucalegon. The coachman 
made no answer — which is my own way when a 
stranger addresses me either in Syriac or in Coptic ; 

25 but by his faint skeptical smile he seemed to insinuate 
that he knew better — for that Ucalegon, as it hap- 
pened, was not in the way-bill, and therefore could 
not have been booked. 

No dignity is perfect which does not at some point 

30 ally itself with the mysterious. The connection of 
the mail with the state and the executive government 
— a connection obvious, but yet not strictly defined — 



5 8 DE QUINCE Y. 

gave to the whole mail establishment an official 
grandeur which did us service on the roads, and 
invested us with seasonable terrors. Not the less 
impressive were those terrors because their legal 
limits were imperfectly ascertained. Look at those 5 
turnpike gates ; with what deferential hurry, with 
what an obedient start, they fly open at our approach ! 
Look at that long line of carts and carters ahead, 
audaciously usurping the very crest of the road. 
Ah, traitors ! they do not hear us as yet ; but, as 10 
soon as the dreadful blast of our horn reaches them 
with proclamation of our approach, see with what 
frenzy of trepidation they fly to their horses' heads, 
and deprecate our wrath by the precipitation of their 
crane-neck quarterings. Treason they feel to be 15 
their crime ; each individual carter feels himself 
under the ban of confiscation and attainder ; his 
blood is attainted through six generations ; and noth- 
ing is wanting but the headsman and his axe, the 
block and the sawdust, to close up the vista of his 20 
horrors. What ! shall it be within benefit of clergy 
to delay the king's message on the highroad — to 
interrupt the great respirations, ebb and flood, systole 
and diastole, of the national intercourse ? — to endanger 
the safety of tidings running day and night between 25 
all nations and languages ? Or can it be fancied, 
among the weakest of men, that the bodies of the 
criminals will be given up to their widows for Chris- 
tian burial ? Now, the doubts which were raised as 
to our powers did more to wrap them in terror, by 3<> 
wrapping them in uncertainty, than could have been 
effected by the sharpest definitions of the law from 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 59 

the quarter sessions. We, on our parts (we, the col- 
lective mail, I mean), did our utmost to exalt the idea 
of our privileges by the insolence with which we 
wielded them. Whether this insolence rested upon 
5 law that gave it a sanction, or upon conscious power 
that haughtily dispensed with that sanction, equally it 
spoke from a potential station ; and the agent, in 
each particular insolence of the moment, was viewed 
reverentially, as one having authority. 

10 Sometimes after breakfast his majesty's mail would 
become frisky ; and, in its difficult wheelings among 
the intricacies of early markets, it would upset an 
apple cart, a cart loaded with eggs, etc. Huge was 
the affliction and dismay, awful was the smash. I, as 

15 far as possible, endeavored in such a case to repre- 
sent the conscience and moral sensibilities of the mail; 
and, when wildernesses of eggs were lying poached 
under our horses' hoofs, then would I stretch forth 
my hands in sorrow, saying (in words too celebrated 

20 at that time, from the false echoes* of Marengo), 
" Ah ! wherefore have we not time to weep over 
you ? " — which was evidently impossible, since, in 
fact, we had not time to laugh over them. Tied to 
post-office allowance, in some cases of fifty minutes for 

25 eleven miles, could the royal mail pretend to under- 
take the offices of sympathy and condolence ? Could 

* "False echoes." — Yes, false ! for the words ascribed to Napo- 
leon, as breathed to the memory of Desaix, never were uttered at 
all. They stand in the same category of theatrical fictions as the 
3° cry of the foundering line-of-battle ship Vengeur, as the vaunt of 
General Cambronne at Waterloo, " La Garde meurt, mais ne se 
rend pas," or as the repartees of Talleyrand. 



60 BE QUINCE Y. 

it be expected to provide tears for the accidents of 
the road ? If even it seemed to trample on humanity, 
it did so, I felt, in discharge of its own more per- 
emptory duties. 

Upholding the morality of the mail, a fortiori I 5 
upheld its rights ; as a matter of duty, I stretched to 
the uttermost its privilege of imperial precedency, and 
astonished weak minds by the feudal powers which I 
hinted to be lurking constructively in the charters of 
this proud establishment. Once I remember being on 10 
the box of the Holyhead mail, between Shrewsbury 
and Oswestry, when a tawdry thing from Birming- 
ham, some Tallyho or Highflyer, all flaunting with 
green and gold, came up alongside of us. What a 
contrast to our royal simplicity of form and color in 15 
this plebeian wretch ! The single ornament on our 
dark ground of chocolate color was the mighty shield 
of the imperial arms, but emblazoned in proportions 
as modest as a signet ring bears to a seal of office. 
Even this was displayed only on a single panel, whis- 2 ° 
pering, rather than proclaiming, our relations to the 
mighty state ; while the beast from Birmingham, our 
green-and-gold friend from false, fleeting, perjured 
Brummagem, had as much writing and painting on its 
sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer 25 
from the tombs of Luxor. For some time this Bir- 
mingham machine ran along by our side — a piece of 
familiarity that already of itself seemed to me suffi- 
ciently Jacobinical. But all at once a movement of the 
horses announced a desperate intention of leaving us 30 
behind. "Do you see that?" I said to the coach- 
man. " I see," was his short answer. He was wide 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 61 

awake — yet he waited longer than seemed prudent; 
for the horses of our audacious opponent had a dis- 
agreeable air of freshness and power. But his motive 
was loyal ; his wish was that the Birmingham conceit 

5 should be full-blown before he froze it. When that 
seemed right, he unloosed, or, to speak by a stronger 
word, he sprang, his known resources : he slipped our 
royal horses like cheetahs, or hunting leopards, after 
the affrighted game. How they could retain such a 

10 reserve of fiery power after the work they had accom- 
plished seemed hard to explain. But on our side, 
besides the physical superiority, was a tower of moral 
strength, namely the king's name, " which they upon 
the adverse faction wanted." Passing them without 

15 an effort, as it seemed, we threw them into the rear 
with so lengthening an interval between us as proved 
in itself the bitterest mockery of their presump- 
tion ; while our guard blew back a shattering blast 
of triumph that was really too painfully full of 

20 derision. 

I mention this little incident for its connection with 
what followed. A Welsh rustic, sitting behind me, 
asked if I had not felt my heart burn within me during 
the progress of the race ? I said, with philosophic 

25 calmness, No; because we were not racing with a 
mail, so that no glory could be gained. In fact, it 
was sufficiently mortifying that such a Birmingham 
thing should dare to challenge us. The Welshman 
replied that he didn't see that; for that a cat might 

30 look at a king, and a Brummagem coach might law- 
fully race the Holyhead mail. "Race us, if you like," 
I replied, " though even that has an air of sedition ; 



62 DE QUINCE Y. 

but not beat us. This would have been treason ; and 
for its own sake I am glad that the Tallyho was 
disappointed." So dissatisfied did the Welshman 
seem with this opinion that at last I was obliged to 
tell him a very fine story from one of our elder dram- 5 
atists : viz., that once, in some far Oriental kingdom 
when the sultan of all the land, with his princes, ladies, 
and chief omrahs were flying their falcons, a hawk 
suddenly flew at a majestic eagle, and, in defiance of 
the eagle's natural advantages, in contempt also of 10 
the eagle's traditional royalty, and before the whole 
assembled field of astonished spectators from Agra 
and Lahore, killed the eagle on the spot. Amaze- 
ment seized the sultan at the unequal contest, and 
burning admiration for its unparalleled result. He 15 
commanded that the hawk should be brought before 
him ; he caressed the bird with enthusiasm ; and he 
ordered that, for the commemoration of his matchless 
courage, a diadem of gold and rubies should be 
solemnly placed on the hawk's head, but then that, 20 
immediately after this solemn coronation, the bird 
should be led off to execution, as the most valiant 
indeed of traitors, but not the less a traitor, as having 
dared to rise rebelliously against his liege lord and 
anointed sovereign, the eagle. " Now," said I to the 25 
Welshman, " to you and me, as men of refined sensi- 
bilities, how painful it would have been that this poor 
Brummagem brute, the Tallyho, in the impossible 
case of a victory over us, should have been crowned 
with Birmingham tinsel, with paste diamonds, and 30 
Roman pearls, and then led off to instant execution." 
The Welshman doubted if that could be warranted 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 63 

by law. And, when I hinted at the 6th of Edward 
Longshanks, chap. 18, for regulating the precedency 
of coaches, as being probably the statute relied on for 
the capital punishment of such offenses, he replied 

5 dryly that, if the attempt to pass a mail really were 
treasonable, it was a pity that the Tallyho appeared 
to have so imperfect an acquaintance with law. 

The modern modes of traveling cannot compare 
with the old mail-coach system in grandeur and power. 

10 They boast of more velocity — not, however, as a con- 
sciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, 
resting upon alien evidence : as, for instance, because 
somebody says that we have gone fifty miles in the 
hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal 

J 5 experience ; or upon the evidence of a result, as that 
actually we find ourselves in York four hours after 
leaving London. Apart from such an assertion, or 
such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. 
But, seated on the old mail coach, we needed no evi- 

sodence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity. On 
this system the word was not magna loquimur, as upon 
railways, but vivimus. Yes, " magna vivimus "; we do 
not make verbal ostentation of our grandeurs, we 
realize our grandeurs in act, and in the very experi- 

25 ence of life. The vital experience of the glad animal 
sensibilities made doubts impossible on the question 
of our speed ; we heard our speed, we saw it, we felt 
it as a thrilling ; and this speed was not the product 
of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to 

30 give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the 
noblest among brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic 
muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs. The sensibility 



64 DE QUINCEY. 

of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his 
eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement ; 
the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But the 
intervening links that connected them, that spread the 
earthquake of battle into the eyeball of the horse, 5 
were the heart of man and its electric thrillings — 
kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then 
propagating its own tumults by contagious shouts and 
gestures to the heart of his servant the horse. But 
now, on the new system of traveling, iron tubes and 10 
boilers have disconnected man's heart from the 
ministers of his locomotion. Nile nor Trafalgar has 
power to raise an extra bubble in a steam kettle. The 
galvanic cycle is broken up forever ; man's imperial 
nature no longer sends itself forward through the 15 
electric sensibility of the horse ; the inter-agencies 
are gone in the mode of communication between the 
horse and his master, out of which grew so many 
aspects of sublimity undier accidents of mists that hid, 
or sudden blazes that revealed, or mobs that agitated, 20 
or midnight solitudes that awed. Tidings fitted to 
convulse alt nations must henceforward travel by 
culinary process ; and the trumpet that once an- 
nounced from afar the laureled mail, heart-shaking 
when heard screaming on the wind and proclaiming 25 
itself through the darkness to every village or solitary 
house on its route, has now given way for ever to the 
pot-wallopings of the boiler. Thus have perished 
multiform openings for public expressions of interest, 
scenical yet natural, in great national tidings — for 30 
revelations of faces and groups that could not offer 
themselves among the fluctuating mobs of a railway 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 65 

station. The gatherings of gazers about a laureled mail 
had one center, and acknowledged one sole interest. 
But the crowds attending at a railway station have as 
little unity as running water, and own as many centers 

5 as there are separate carriages in the train. 

How else, for example, than as a constant watcher 
for the dawn, and for the London mail that in summer 
months entered about daybreak among the lawny 
thickets of Marlborough forest, couldst thou, sweet 

10 Fanny of the Bath road, have become the glorified 
inmate of my dreams ? Yet Fanny, as the loveliest 
young woman for face and person that perhaps in my 
whole life I have beheld, merited the station which 
even now, from a distance of forty years, she holds in 

15 my dreams ; yes, though by links of natural associ- 
ation she brings along with her a troop of dreadful 
creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that are more 
abominable to the heart than Fanny and the dawn are 
delightful. 

20 Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, 
lived at a mile's distance from that road, but came so 
continually to meet the mail that I on my frequent 
transits rarely missed her, and naturally connected 
her image with the great thoroughfare where only I 

25 had ever seen her. Why she came so punctually I do 
not exactly know ; but I believe with some burden 
of commissions, to be executed in Bath, which had 
gathered to her own residence as a central rendezvous 
for converging them. The mail-coachman who drove 

30 the Bath mail and wore the royal livery* happened to 

*" Wore the royal livery." — The general impression was that 
the royal livery belonged of right to the mail-coachmen as their 



66 DE QUINCE Y. 

be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he was, that 
loved his beautiful granddaughter, and, loving her 
wisely, was vigilant over her deportment in any case 
where young Oxford might happen to be concerned. 
Did my vanity then suggest that I myself, individually, 5 
could fall within the line of his terrors ? Certainly 
not, as regarded any physical pretensions that I could 
plead ; for Fanny (as a chance passenger from her 
own neighborhood once told me) counted in her train 
a hundred and ninety-nine professed admirers, if not IO 
open aspirants to her favor ; and probably not one of 
the whole brigade but excelled myself in personal 
advantages. Ulysses even, with the unfair advantage 
of his accursed bow, could hardly have undertaken 
that amount of suitors. So the danger might have I5 
seemed slight — only that woman is universally aristo- 
cratic ; it is among her nobilities of heart that she 
is so. Now, the aristocratic distinctions in my favor 
might easily with Miss Fanny have compensated 
my physical deficiencies. Did I then make love to 2 ° 
Fanny ? Why, yes ; about as much love as one could 
make while the mail was changing horses — a process 
which, ten years later, did not occupy above eighty 
seconds ; but then — viz., about Waterloo — it occupied 
five times eighty. Now, four hundred seconds offer a 2 5 

professional dress. But that was an error. To the guard it did 
belong, I believe, and was obviously essential as an official warrant, 
and as a means of instant identification for his person, in the dis- 
charge of his important public duties. But the coachman, and 
especially if his place in the series did not connect him immedi- 3° 
ately with London and the General Post Office, obtained the 
scarlet coat only as an honorary distinction after long (or, if not 
long, trying and special) service. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 67 

field quite ample enough for whispering into a young 
woman's ear a great deal of truth, and (by way of 
parenthesis) some trifle of falsehood. Grandpapa did 
right, therefore, to watch me. And yet, as happens 
5 too often to the grandpapas of earth in a contest with 
the admirers of granddaughters, how vainly would he 
have watched me had I meditated any evil whispers to 
Fanny ! She, it is my belief, would have protected 
herself against any man's evil suggestions. But he, 
10 as the result showed, could not have intercepted the 
opportunities for such suggestions. Yet, why not ? 
Was he not active ? Was he not blooming ? Bloom- 
ing he was as Fanny herself. 

Say, all our praises why should lords 

15 Stop, that's not the line. 

Say, all our roses why should girls engross ? 

The coachman showed rosy blossoms on his face 
deeper even than his granddaughter's — his being 
drawn from the ale cask, Fanny's from the fountains 

20 of the dawn. But, in spite of his blooming face, some 
infirmities he had; and one particularly in which he too 
much resembled a crocodile. This lay in a monstrous 
inaptitude for turning round. The crocodile, I pre- 
sume, owes that inaptitude to the absurd length of his 

25 back ; but in our grandpapa it arose rather from the 
absurd breadth of his back, combined, possibly, with 
some growing stiffness in his legs. Now, upon this 
crocodile infirmity of his I planted a human advantage 
for tendering my homage to Miss Fanny. In defiance 

30 of all his honorable vigilance, no sooner had he pre- 



6S DE QUWCEY. 

sented to us his mighty Jovian back (what a field for dis- 
playing to mankind his royal scarlet !), while inspecting 
professionally the buckles, the straps, and the silvery 
turrets* of his harness, than I raised Miss Fanny's 
hand to my lips, and, by the mixed tenderness and 5 
respectfulness of my manner, caused her easily to un- 
derstand how happy it would make me to rank upon 
her list as No. 10 or 12 : in which case a few casualties 
among her lovers (and, observe, they hanged liberally 
in those days) might have promoted me speedily to 10 
the top of the tree ; as, on the other hand, with how 
much loyalty of submission I acquiesced by antici- 
pation in her award, supposing that she should plant 
me in the very rearward of her favor, as No. 1994-1. 
Most truly I loved this beautiful and ingenuous girl ; 15 
and, had it not been for the Bath mail, timing all 
courtships by post-office allowance, Heaven only knows 
what might have come of it. People talk of being 
over head and ears in love ; now, the mail was the 
cause that I sank only over ears in love — which, you 20 
know, still left a trifle of brain to overlook the whole 
conduct of the affair. 

Ah, reader ! when I look back upon those days, it 
seems to me that all things change — all things perish. 
" Perish the roses and the palms of kings ; " perish 25 

* " Turrets" — As one who loves and venerates Chaucer for his 
unrivaled merits of tenderness, of picturesque characterization, and 
of narrative skill, I noticed with great pleasure that the word 
torrettes is used by him to designate the little devices through 
which the reins are made to pass. This same word, in the same 30 
exact sense, I heard uniformly used by many scores of illustrious 
mail-coachmen to whose confidential friendship I had the honor of 
being admitted in my younger days. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 69 

even the crowns and trophies of Waterloo ; thunder 
and lightning are not the thunder and lightning which 
I remember. Roses are degenerating. The Fannies 
of our island — thought his I say with reluctance — 

5 are not visibly improving ; and the Bath road is no- 
toriously superannuated. Crocodiles, you will say, 
are stationary. Mr. Waterton tells me that the 
crocodile does not change — that a cayman, in fact, or 
an alligator, is just as good for riding upon as he was 

10 in the time of the Pharaohs. That may be ; but the 
reason is that the crocodile does not live fast — he is 
a slow coach. I believe it is generally understood 
among naturalists that the crocodile is a blockhead. 
It is my own impression that the Pharaohs were also 

15 blockheads. Now, as the Pharaohs and the crocodile 
domineered over Egyptian society, this accounts for 
a singular mistake that prevailed through innumerable 
generations on the Nile. The crocodile made the 
ridiculous blunder of supposing man to be meant 

20 chiefly for his own eating. Man, taking a different 
view of the subject, naturally met that mistake by 
another ; he viewed the crocodile as a thing some- 
times to worship, but always to run away from. And 
this continued till Mr. Waterton* changed the rela- 

25 * " Mr. Waterton." — Had the reader lived through the last 
generation, he would not need to be told that, some thirty or 
thirty-five years back, Mr. Waterton, a distinguished country 
gentleman of ancient family in Northumberland, publicly 
mounted and rode in top-boots a savage old crocodile, that was 

30 restive and very impertinent, but all to no purpose. The croco- 
dile jibbed and tried to kick, but vainly. He was no more able to 
throw the squire than Sinbad was to throw the old scoundrel who 
used his back without paying for it, until he discovered a mode 



70 DE QUINCE V. 

tions between the animals. The mode of escaping 
from the reptile he showed to be not by running away, 
but by leaping on its back booted and spurred. The 
two animals had misunderstood each other. The use 
of the crocodile has now been cleared up — viz., to be 5 
ridden ; and the final cause of man is that he may 
improve the health of the crocodile by riding him 
a-foxhunting before breakfast. And it is pretty cer- 
tain that any crocodile who has been regularly 
hunted through the season, and is master of the 10 
weight he carries, will take a six-barred gate now 
as well as ever he would have done in the infancy 
of the Pyramids. 

If therefore, the crocodile does not change, all 
things else undeniably do : even the shadow of the 15 
Pyramids grows less. And often the restoration in 
vision of Fanny and the Bath road makes me too 
pathetically sensible of that truth. Out of the dark- 
ness, if I happen to call back the image of Fanny, up 
rises suddenly from a gulf of forty years a rose in 20 
June ; or if I think for an instant of the rose in June, 
up rises the heavenly face of Fanny. One after the 
other, like the antiphonies in the choral service, rise 
Fanny and the rose in June, then back again the rose 
in June and Fanny. Then come both together, as in 25 
a chorus — roses and Fannies, Fannies and roses, with- 
out end, thick as blossoms in Paradise. Then comes 
a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and 
gold, with sixteen capes ; and the crocodile is driving 
four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail. And 3<> 

(slightly immoral, perhaps, though some think not) of murdering 
the old fraudulent jockey, and so circuitously of unhorsing him. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 71 

suddenly we upon the mail are pulled up by a mighty 
dial, sculptured with the hours, that mingle with the 
heavens and the heavenly host. Then all at once we 
are arrived at Marlborough forest, among the lovely 
5 households* of the roe deer; the deer and their 
fawns retire into the dewy thickets ; the thickets are 
rich with roses ; once again the roses call up the 
sweet countenance of Fanny ; and she, being the 
granddaughter of a crocodile, awakens a dreadful host 

10 of semi-legendary animate — griffins, dragons, basilisks, 
sphinxes — till at length the whole vision of fighting 
images crowds into one towering armorial shield, a 
vast emblazonry of human charities and human love- 
liness that have perished, but quartered heraldically 

15 with unutterable and demoniac natures, while over all 
rises, as a surmounting crest, one fair female hand, 
with the forefinger pointing, in sweet, sorrowful 
admonition, upward to heaven, where is sculptured 
the eternal writing which proclaims the frailty of 

20 earth and her children. 

GOING DOWN WITH VICTORY. 

But the grandest chapter of our experience within 
the whole mail-coach service was on those occasions 
when we went down from London with the news of 

25 * " Households." — Roe deer do not congregate in herds like the 
fallow or the red deer, but by separate families, parents and chil- 
dren ; which feature of approximation to the sanctity of human 
hearths, added to their comparatively miniature and graceful pro- 
portions, conciliates to them an interest of peculiar tenderness, 

30 supposing even that this beautiful creature is less characteristically 
impressed with the grandeurs of savage and forest life. 



72 DE QUINCE Y. 

victory. A period of about ten years stretched from 
Trafalgar to Waterloo ; the second and third years of 
which period (1806 and 1807) were comparatively 
sterile ; but the other nine (from 1805 to 1815 inclu- 
sively) furnished a long succession of victories, the 5 
least of which, in such a contest of Titans, had an in- 
appreciable value of position : partly for its absolute 
interference with the plans of our enemy, but still 
more from its keeping alive through central Europe 
the sense of a deep-seated vulnerability in France. 10 
Even to tease the coasts of our enemy, to mortify 
-them by continual blockades, to insult them by cap- 
turing if it were but a baubling schooner under the 
eyes of their arrogant armies, repeated from time to 
time a sullen proclamation of power lodged in one 15 
quarter to which the hopes of Christendom turned in 
secret. How much more loudly must this proclama- 
tion have spoken in the audacity* of having bearded 

* "Audacity" — Such the French accounted it ; and it has struck 
me that Soult would not have been so popular in London, at the 20 
period of her present Majesty's coronation, or in Manchester, on 
occasion of his visit to that town, if they had been aware of the 
insolence with which he spoke of us in notes written at intervals 
from the field of Waterloo. As though it had been mere felony in 
our army to look a French one in the face, he said in more notes 25 
than one, dated from 2 to 4 p. m. on the field of Waterloo, 
" Here are the English — we have them ; they are caught en 
flagrant de'lit.'" Yet no man should have known us better ; no 
man had drunk deeper from the cup of humiliation than Soult had 
in 1809, when ejected by us with headlong violence from Oporto, 30 
and pursued through a long line of wrecks to the frontier of 
Spain ; and subsequently at Albuera, in the bloodiest of recorded 
battles, to say nothing of Toulouse, he should have learned our 
pretensions* 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 73 

the elite of their troops, and having beaten them in 
pitched battles ! Five years of life it was worth pay- 
ing down for the privilege of an outside place on a 
mail coach, when carrying down the first tidings of 
5 any such event. And it is to be noted that, from our 
insular situation, and the multitude of our frigates dis- 
posable for the rapid transmission of intelligence, 
rarely did any unauthorized rumor steal away a preli- 
bation from the first aroma of the regular dispatches. 

ioThe government news was generally the earliest 
news. 

From 8 p. m. to fifteen or twenty minutes later im- 
agine the mails assembled on parade in Lombard 
Street ; where, at that time,* and not in St. Martin's- 

15 le-Grand, was seated the General Post Office. In 
what exact strength we mustered I do not remember ; 
but, from the length of each separate attelage, we filled 
the street, though a long one, and though we were 
drawn up in double file. On any night the spectacle 

20 was beautiful. The absolute perfection of all the ap- 
pointments about the carriages and the harness, their 
strength, their brilliant cleanliness, their beautiful 
simplicity — but, more than all, the royal magnificence 
of the horses — were what might first have fixed the 

25 attention. Every carriage on every morning in the 
year was taken down to an official inspector for ex- 
amination : wheels, axles, linchpins, pole, glasses, 
lamps, were all critically probed and tested. Every 
part of every carriage had been cleaned, every horse 

30 had been groomed, with as much rigor as if they be- 
longed to a private gentleman ; and that part of the 
* " At that time" — I speak of the era previous to Waterloo. 



74 BE QUINCE Y. 

spectacle offered itself always. But the night before 
us is a night of victory ; and, behold ! to the ordinary 
display what a heart-shaking addition ! — horses, men, 
carriages, all are dressed in laurels and flowers, oak- 
leaves and ribbons. The guards, as being officially 5 
his majesty's servants, and of the coachmen such as 
are within the privilege of the Post Office, wear the 
royal liveries of course ; and, as it is summer (for all 
the land victories were naturally won in summer), they 
wear, on this fine evening, these liveries exposed to 10 
view, without any covering of upper coats. Such a 
costume, and the elaborate arrangement of the laurels 
in their hats, dilate their hearts, by giving to them 
openly a personal connection with the great news in 
which already they have the general interest of patriot- 15 
ism. That great national sentiment surmounts and 
quells all sense of ordinary distinctions. Those pas- 
sengers who happen to be gentlemen are now hardly 
to be distinguished as such except by dress ; for the 
usual reserve of their manner in speaking to the at- 20 
tendants has on this night melted away. One heart, 
one pride, one glory, connects every man by the tran- 
scendent bond of his national blood. The spectators, 
who are numerous beyond precedent, express their 
sympathy with these fervent feelings by continual 25 
hurrahs. Every moment are shouted aloud by the 
post-office servants, and summoned to draw up, the 
great ancestral names of cities known to history 
through a thousand years — Lincoln, Winchester, 
Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, 30 
York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stir- 
ling, Aberdeen — expressing the grandeur of the em- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 75 

pire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of 
the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of 
its separate missions. Every moment you hear the 
thunder of lids locked down upon the mailbags. 
5 That sound to each individual mail is the signal for 
drawing off ; which process is the finest part of the 
entire spectacle. Then come the horses into play. 
Horses ! can these be horses that bound off with the 
action and gestures of leopards ? What stir ! what 

10 sea-like ferment! what a thundering of wheels! 
what a trampling of hoofs ! what a sounding of 
trumpets ! what farewell cheers ! what redoubling 
peals of brotherly congratulation, connecting the name 
of the particular mail — " Liverpool forever ! " with the 

15 name of the particular victory — " Badajoz forever ! " 
or " Salamanca forever ! " The half-slumbering con- 
sciousness that all night long, and all the next day 
— perhaps for even a longer period — many of these 
mails, like fire racing along a train of gunpowder, will 

20 be kindling at every instant new successions of burn- 
ing joy, has an obscure effect of multiplying the vic- 
tory itself, by multiplying to the imagination into in- 
finity the stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery 
arrow seems to be let loose, which from that moment 

25 is destined to travel, without intermission, westward 
for three hundred* miles — northward for six hundred; 

* " Three hundred." — Of necessity, this scale of measurement, 
to an American, if he happens to be a thoughtless man, must 
sound ludicrous. Accordingly, I remember a case in which an 
30 American writer indulges himself in the luxury of a little fibbing, 
by ascribing to an Englishman a pompous account of the Thames, 
constructed entirely upon American ideas of grandeur, and con- 



76 BE QUINCE Y. 

and the sympathy of our Lombard Street friends at 
parting is exalted a hundredfold by a sort of vision- 
ary sympathy with the yet slumbering sympathies 
which in so vast a succession we are going to awake. 

Liberated from the embarrassments of the city, and 5 
issuing into the broad uncrowded avenues of the 

eluding in something like these terms: "And, sir, arriving at 
London, this mighty father of rivers attains a breadth of at least 
two furlongs, having, in its winding course, traversed the astonish- 
ing distance of one hundred and seventy miles." And this the IO 
candid American thinks it fair to contrast with the scale of the 
Mississippi. Now, it is hardly worth while to answer a pure fic- 
tion gravely ; else one might say that no Englishman out of Bed- 
lam ever thought of looking in an island for the rivers of a conti- 
nent, nor, consequently, could have thought of looking for the *5 
peculiar grandeur of the Thames in the length of its course, or in 
the extent of soil which it drains. Yet, if he had been so absurd, 
the American might have recollected that a river, not to be com- 
pared with the Thames even as to volume of water — viz., the 
Tiber — has contrived to make itself heard of in this world for 20 
twenty-five centuries to an extent not reached as yet by any river, 
however corpulent, of his own land. The glory of the Thames is 
measured by the destiny of the population to which it ministers, 
by the commerce which it supports, by the grandeur of the empire 
in which, though far from the largest, it is the most influential 25 
stream. Upon some such scale, and not by a transfer to Colum- 
bian standards, is the course of our English mails to be valued. 
The American may fancy the effect of his own valuations to our 
English ears by supposing the case of a Siberian glorifying his 
country in these terms : " These wretches, sir, in France and 30 
England, cannot march half a mile in any direction without find- 
ing a house where food can be had and lodging ; whereas, such is 
the noble desolation of our magnificent country that in many a 
direction for a thousand miles I will engage that a dog shall not 
find shelter from a snow storm, nor a wren find an apology for 35 
breakfast." 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 77 

northern suburbs, we soon begin to enter upon our 
natural pace of ten miles an hour. In the broad light 
of the summer evening, the sun, perhaps, only just at 
the point of setting, we are seen from every story of 
5 every house. Heads of every age crowd to the win- 
dows ; young and old understand the language of 
our victorious symbols ; and rolling volleys of sympa- 
thizing cheers run along us, behind us, and before us. 
The beggar, rearing himself against the wall, forgets 

10 his lameness, — real or assumed, — thinks not of his 
whining trade, but stands erect, with bold exulting 
smiles, as we pass him. The victory has healed him, 
and says, Be thou whole ! Women and children, 
from garrets alike and cellars, through infinite Lon- 

15 don, look down or look up with loving eyes upon our 
gay ribbons and our martial laurels ; sometimes kiss 
their hands ; sometimes hang out, as signals of affec- 
tion, pocket handkerchiefs, aprons, dusters, anything 
that, by catching the summer breezes, will express an 

20 aerial jubilation. On the London side of Barnet, to 
which we draw near within a few minutes after nine, 
observe that private carriage which is approaching us. 
The weather being so warm, the glasses are all down ; 
and one may read, as on the stage of a theater, every - 

"5 thing that goes on within. It contains three ladies — 
one likely to be " mamma," and two of seventeen or 
eighteen, who are probably her daughters. What 
lovely animation, what beautiful unpremeditated pan- 
tomime, explaining to us every syllable that passes, 

3 ) in these ingenuous girls ! By the sudden start and 
raising of the hands on first discovering our laureled 
equipage, by the sudden movement and appeal to the 



78 DE QUINCE Y. 

elder lady from both of them, and by the heightened 
color on their animated countenances, we can almost 
hear them saying, " See, see ! Look at their laurels ! 
Oh, mamma ! there has been a great battle in Spain ; 
and it has been a great victory." In a moment we 5 
are on the point of passing them. We passengers — 
I on the box, and the two on the roof behind me — 
raise our hats to the ladies ; the coachman makes his 
professional salute with the whip ; the guard even, 
though punctilious on the matter of his dignity as an 10 
officer under the crown, touches his hat. The ladies 
move to us, in return, with a winning graciousness of 
gesture ; all smile on each side in a way that nobody 
could misunderstand, and that nothing short of a 
grand national sympathy could so instantaneously 15 
prompt. Will these ladies say that we are nothing to 
them ? Oh, no ; they will not say that ! They cannot 
deny — they do not deny — that for this night they are 
our sisters ; gentle or simple, scholar or illiterate 
servant, for twelve hours to come, we on the outside 20 
have the honor to be their brothers. Those poor 
women, again, who stop to gaze upon us with delight 
at the entrance of Barnet, and seem, by their air of 
weariness, to be returning from labor — do you mean 
to say that they are washerwomen and charwomen ? 2 5 
Oh, my poor friend, you are quite mistaken. I assure 
you they stand in a far higher rank ; for this one 
night they feel themselves by birthright to be daugh- 
ters of England, and answer to no humbler title. 

Every joy, however, even rapturous joy, — such is 30 
the sad law of earth, — may carry with it grief, or fear 
of grief, to some. Three miles beyond Barnet, we 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 79 

see approaching us another private carriage, nearly 
repeating the circumstances of the former case. Here, 
also, the glasses are all down ; here, also, is an elderly- 
lady seated ; but the two daughters are missing ; for 
5 the single young person sitting by the lady's side 
seems to be an attendant — so I judge from her dress, 
and her air of respectful reserve. The lady is in 
mourning; and her countenance expresses sorrow. 
At first she does not look up ; so that I believe she is 

ionot aware of our approach, until she hears the meas- 
ured beating of our horses' hoofs. Then she raises 
her eyes to settle them painfully on our triumphal 
equipage. Our decorations explain the case to her at 
once ; but she beholds them with apparent anxiety, 

15 or even with terror. Some time before this, I, find- 
ing it difficult to hit a flying mark when embarrassed 
by the coachman's person and reins intervening, had 
given to the guard a Courier evening paper, contain- 
ing the gazette, for the next carriage that might pass. 

20 Accordingly he tossed it in, so folded that the huge 
capitals expressing some such legend as glorious victory 
might catch the eye at once. To see the paper, how- 
ever, at all, interpreted as it was by our ensigns of 
triumph, explained everything ; and, if the guard were 

25 right in thinking the lady to have received it with a 
gesture of horror, it could not be doubtful that she 
had suffered some deep personal affliction in connec- 
tion with this Spanish war. 

Here, now, was the case of one who, having for- 

3omerly suffered, might, erroneously perhaps, be dis- 
tressing herself with anticipations of another similar 
suffering. That same night, and hardly three hours 



8o DE QUINCE V. 

later, occurred the reverse case. A poor woman, who 
too probably would find herself, in a day or two, to 
have suffered the heaviest of afflictions by the battle, 
blindly allowed herself to express an exultation so 
unmeasured in the news and its details as gave to her 5 
the appearance which among Celtic Highlanders is 
called /<?>>. This was at some little town where we 
changed horses an hour or two after midnight. Some 
fair or wake had kept the people up out of their beds, 
and had occasioned a partial illumination of the stalls 10 
and booths, presenting an unusual but very impressive • 
effect. We saw many lights moving about as we drew 
near ; and perhaps the most striking scene on the 
whole route was our reception at this place. The 
flashing of torches and the beautiful radiance of blue I5 
lights (technically, Bengal lights) upon the heads of 
our horses ; the fine effect of such a showery and 
ghostly illumination falling upon our flowers and 
glittering laurels*; whilst all around ourselves, that 
formed a center of light, the darkness gathered on 20 
the rear and flanks in massy blackness ; these optical 
splendors, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of 
the people, composed a picture at once scenical and 
affecting, theatrical and holy. As we stayed for three 
or four minutes, I alighted ; and immediately from a 25 
dismantled stall in the street, where no doubt she had 
been presiding through the earlier part of the night, 
advanced eagerly a middle-aged woman. The sight 
of my newspaper it was that had drawn her attention 

* " Glittering laurels" — I must observe that the color of green <j 
suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of 
Bengal lights. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 8 1 

upon myself. The victory which we were carrying 
down to the provinces on this occasion was the imper- 
fect one of Talavera — imperfect for its results, such 
was the virtual treachery of the Spanish general, 
5 Cuesta, but not imperfect in its ever memorable 
heroism. I told her the main outline of the battle. 
The agitation of her enthusiasm had been so con- 
spicuous when listening, and when first applying for 
information, that I could not but ask her if she had 

ionot some relative in the Peninsular army. Oh, yes ; 
her only son was there. In what regiment ? He was 
a trooper in the Twenty-third Dragoons. My heart 
sank within me as she made that answer. This sub- 
lime regiment, which an Englishman should never 

15 mention without raising his hat to their memory, had 
made the most memorable and effective charge 
recorded in military annals. They leaped their 
horses — over a trench where they could ; into it, and 
with the result of death or mutilation, when they could 

20 not. What proportion cleared the trench is nowhere 
stated. Those who did closed up and went down 
upon the enemy with such divinity of fervor (I use 
the word divinity by design ; the inspiration of God 
must have prompted this movement to those whom 

25 even then he was calling to his presence) that two 
results followed. As regarded the enemy, this 
Twenty-third Dragoons, not, I believe, originally three 
hundred and fifty strong, paralyzed a French column 
six thousand strong, then ascended the hill, and fixed 

30 the gaze of the whole French army. As regarded 
themselves, the Twenty-third were supposed at first 
to have been barely not annihilated ; but eventually, I 



82 DE QUINCE Y. 

believe, about one in four survived. And this, then, 
was the regiment — a regiment already for some hours 
glorified and hallowed to the ear of all London, as 
lying stretched, by a large majority, upon one bloody 
aceldama — in which the young trooper served whose 5 
mother was now talking in a spirit of such joyous 
enthusiasm. Did I tell her the truth ? Had I the 
heart to break up her dreams ? No. To-morrow, 
said I to myself — to-morrow, or the next day, will 
publish the worst. For one night more wherefore 10 
should she not sleep in peace ? After to-morrow the 
chances are too many that peace will forsake her 
pillow. This brief respite, then, let her owe to my 
gift and my forbearance. But, if I told her not of the 
bloody price that had been paid, not therefore was I 15 
silent on the contributions from her son's regiment to 
that day's service and glory. I showed her not the 
funeral banners under which the noble regiment was 
sleeping. I lifted not the overshadowing laurels from 
the bloody trench in which horse and rider lay 20 
mangled together. But I told her how these dear 
children of England, officers and privates, had leaped 
their horses over all obstacles as gayly as hunters to 
the morning's chase. I told her how they rode their 
horses into the mists of death — saying to myself, but 25 
not saying to her, " and laid down their young lives 
for thee, O Mother England ! as willingly — poured 
out their noble blood as cheerfully — as ever, after a 
long day's sport, when infants, they had rested their 
wearied heads upon their mother's knees, or had sunk 30 
to sleep in her arms." Strange it is, yet true, that 
she seemed to have no fears for her son's safety, even 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. ^3 

after this knowledge that the Twenty-third Dragoons 
had been memorably engaged ; but so much was she 
enraptured by the knowledge that his regiment, and 
therefore that he, had rendered conspicuous service in 

5 the dreadful conflict — a service which had actually 
made them, within the last twelve hours, the foremost 
topic of conversation in London — so absolutely was 
fear swallowed up in joy — that in the mere simplicity 
of her fervent nature, the poor woman threw her arms 

10 round my neck, as she thought of her son, and gave 
to me the kiss which secretly was meant for him. 

Section II — The Vision of Sudden Death. 

What is to be taken as the predominant opinion of 
man, reflective and philosophic, upon sudden death ? 

15 It is remarkable that, in different conditions of society, 
sudden death has been variously regarded as the con- 
summation of an earthly career most fervently to be 
desired, or again, as that consummation which is with 
most horror to be deprecated. Caesar the Dictator, at 

20 his last dinner party {co>?ia), on the very evening be- 
fore his assassination, when the minutes of his earthly 
career were numbered, being asked what death in his 
judgment, might be pronounced the most eligible, 
replied, " That which should be most sudden." On 

25 the other hand, the divine Litany of our English 
Church, when breathing forth supplications, as if in 
some representative character, for the whole human 
race prostrate before God, places such a death in the 
very van of horrors: "From lightning and tempest ; 

30 from plague, pestilence, and famine ; from battle and 



84 DE QUINCE Y. 

murder and from sudden death — Good Lord, deliver 
us." Sudden death is here made to crown the climax 
in a grand ascent of calamities ; it is ranked among 
the last of curses ; and yet by the noblest of Romans 
it was ranked as the first of blessings. In that differ- 5 
ence most readers will see little more than the essen- 
tial difference between Christianity and Paganism. 
But this, on consideration, I doubt. The Christian 
Church may be right in its estimate of sudden death ; 
and it is a natural feeling, though after all it may also 10 
be an infirm one, to wish for a quiet dismissal from 
life, as that which seems most reconcilable with medi- 
tation, with penitential retrospects, and with the 
humilities of farewell prayer. There does not, how- 
ever, occur to me any direct scriptural warrant for 15 
this earnest petition of the English Litany, unless 
under a special construction of the word " sudden." 
It seems a petition indulged rather and conceded to 
human infirmity than exacted from human piety. It is 
not so much a doctrine built upon the eternities of the 20 
Christian system as a plausible opinion built upon 
special varieties of physical temperament. Let that, 
however, be as it may, two remarks suggest themselves 
as prudent restraints upon a doctrine which else may 
wander, and has wandered, into an uncharitable super- 25 
stition. The first is this : that many people are likely 
to exaggerate the horror of a sudden death from the 
disposition to lay a false stress upon words or acts 
simply because by an accident they have become final 
words or acts. If a man dies, for instance, by some 3° 
sudden death when he happens to be intoxicated, such 
a death is falsely regarded with peculiar horror ; as 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 85 

though the intoxication were suddenly exalted into 
a blasphemy. But that is unphilosophic. The man 
was, or he was not, habitually a drunkard. If not, if 
his intoxication were a solitary accident, there can be 

5 no reason for allowing special emphasis to this act 
simply because through misfortune it became his final 
act. Nor, on the other hand, if it were no accident, 
but one of his habitual transgressions, will it be the 
more habitual or the more a transgression because 

10 some sudden calamity, surprising him, has caused this 
habitual transgression to be also a final one. Could 
the man have had any reason even dimly to foresee 
his own sudden death, there would have been a new 
feature in his act of intemperance — a feature of pre- 

i 5 sumption and irreverence, as one that, having known 
himself drawing near to the presence of God, should 
have suited his demeanor to an expectation so awful. 
But this is no part of the case supposed. And the 
only new element in the man's act is not any element 

20 of special immorality, but simply of special mis- 
fortune. 

The other remark has reference to the meaning of 
the word sudden. Very possibly Caesar and the Chris- 
tian Church do not differ in the way supposed— that 

25 is do not differ by any difference of doctrine as 
between Pagan and Christian views of the moral tem- 
per appropriate to death ; but perhaps they are con- 
templating different cases. Both contemplate a violent 
death, a BiaSavatoS— death that is fiiawZ, or in 

30 other words, death that is brought about, not by inter- 
nal and spontaneous change, but by active force hav- 
ing its origin from without. In this meaning the two 



S6 DE QUINCE V. 

authorities agree. Thus far they are in harmony. 
But the difference is that the Roman by the word 
'' sudden " means un/i/igering, whereas the Christian 
Litany by " sudden death " means a death without 
warning, consequently without any available summons 5 
to religious preparation. The poor mutineer who 
kneels down to gather into his heart the bullets from 
twelve firelocks of his pitying comrades dies by a most 
sudden death, in Caesar's sense ; one shock, one mighty 
spasm, one (possibly not one) groan, and all is over. 10 
But, in the sense of the Litany, the mutineer's death 
is far from sudden ; his offense originally, his imprison, 
ment, his trial, the interval between his sentence and 
its execution, having all furnished him with separate 
warnings of his fate — having all summoned him to 15 
meet it with solemn preparation. 

Here at once, in this sharp verbal distinction, we 
comprehend the faithful earnestness with which a 
holy Christian Church pleads on behalf of her poor 
departing children that God would vouchsafe to them 20 
the last great privilege and distinction possible on a 
deathbed, viz., the opportunity of untroubled prepara- 
tion for facing this mighty trial. Sudden death, as a 
mere variety in the modes of dying where death in 
some shape is inevitable, proposes a question of 25 
choice which, equally in the Roman and the Christian 
sense, will be variously answered according to each 
man's variety of temperament. Meantime, one aspect 
of sudden death there is, one modification, upon 
which no doubt can arise, that of all martyrdoms it is 30 
the most agitating — viz., where it surprises a man 
under circumstances which offer (or which seem to 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 87 

offer) some hurrying, flying, inappreciably minute 
chance of evading it. Sudden as the danger which 
it affronts must be any effort by which such an evasion 
can be accomplished. Even that, even the sickening 
5 necessity for hurrying in extremity where all hurry 
seems destined to be vain — even that anguish is liable 
to a hideous exasperation in one particular case, viz., 
where the appeal is made not exclusively to the in- 
stinct of self-preservation, but to the conscience, on 

10 behalf of some other life besides your own, accidentally 
thrown upon your protection. To fail, to collapse in 
a service merely your own, might seem comparatively 
venial ; though, in fact, it is far from venial. But to 
fail in a case where Providence has suddenly thrown 

15 into your hands the final interests of another — a fel- 
low-creature shuddering between the gates of life and 
death ; this, to a man of apprehensive conscience, 
would mingle the misery of an atrocious criminality 
with the misery of a bloody calamity. You are 

20 called upon, by the case supposed, possibly to die, 
but to die at the very moment when, by any even par- 
tial failure or effeminate collapse of your energies, 
you will be self-denounced as a murderer. You had 
but the twinkling of an eye for your effort, and that 

25 effort might have been unavailing ; but to have risen 
to the level of such an effort would have rescued you, 
though not from dying, yet from dying as a traitor to 
your final and farewell duty. 

The situation here contemplated exposes a dread- 

3oful ulcer, lurking far down in the depths of human 
nature. It is not that men generally are summoned 
to face such awful trials. But potentially, and in 



88 DE QUINCE Y. 

shadowy outline, such a trial is moving subterrane- 
ously in perhaps all men's natures. Upon the secret 
mirror of our dreams such a trial is darkly projected, 
perhaps, to every one of us. That dream, so familiar 
to childhood, of meeting a lion, and, through languish- 5 
ing prostration in hope and the energies of hope, that 
constant sequel of lying down before the lion, pub- 
lishes the secret frailty of human nature — reveals its 
deep-seated falsehood to itself — records its abysmal 
treachery. Perhaps not one of us escapes that dream; 10 
perhaps, as by some sorrowful doom of man, that 
dream repeats for every one of us, through every 
generation, the original temptation in Eden. Every 
one of us, in this dream, has a bait offered to the 
infirm places of his own individual will ; once again 15 
a snare is presented for tempting him into captivity to 
a luxury of ruin ; once again, as in aboriginal Para- 
dise, the man falls by his own choice ; again, by infi- 
nite iteration, the ancient earth groans to heaven, 
through her secret caves, over the weakness of her 20 
child. " Nature, from her seat, sighing through all 
her works," again " gives signs of woe that all is 
lost " ; and again the counter-sigh is repeated to the 
sorrowing heavens for the endless rebellion against 
God. It is not without probability that in the world 25 
of dreams every one of us ratifies for himself the 
original transgression. In dreams, perhaps under 
some secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted 
up to the consciousness at the time, but darkened to 
the memory as soon as all is finished, each several 30 
child of our mysterious race completes for himself 
the treason of the aboriginal fall. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 89 

The incident, so memorable in itself by its features 
of horror, and so scenical by its grouping for the eye, 
which furnished the text for this reverie upon Sudden 
Death, occurred to myself in the dead of night, as 
5 a solitary spectator, when seated on the box of the 
Manchester and Glasgow mail, in the second or third 
summer after Waterloo. I find it necessary to relate 
the circumstances, because they are such as could not 
have occurred unless under a singular combination of 

10 accidents. In those days, the oblique and lateral 
communications with many rural post offices were so 
arranged, either through necessity or through defect 
of system, as to make it requisite for the main north- 
western mail (/. e., the down mail) on reaching Man- 

15 Chester to halt for a number of hours ; how many, I 
do not remember ; six or seven, I think ; but the re- 
sult was that, in the ordinary course, the mail recom- 
menced its journey northward about midnight. 
Wearied with the long detention at a gloomy hotel, I 

20 walked out about eleven o'clock at night for the sake 
of fresh air ; meaning to fall in with the mail and re- 
sume my seat at the post office. The night, however, 
being yet dark, as the moon had scarcely risen, and 
the Streets being at that hour empty, so as to offer no 

25 opportunities for asking the road, I lost my way, and 
did not reach the post office until it was considerably 
past midnight ; but, to my great relief (as it was im- 
portant for me to be in Westmoreland by the morning) 
I saw in the huge saucer eyes of the mail, blazing 

30 through the gloom, an evidence that my chance was 
not yet lost. Past the time it was ; but, by some 
rare accident, the mail was not even yet ready to 



9° DE QUINCE Y. 

start. I ascended to my seat on the box, where my 
cloak was still lying as it had lain at the Bridgewater 
Arms. I had left it there in imitation of a nautical 
discoverer, who leaves a bit of bunting on the shore 
of his discovery, by way of warning off the ground the 5 
whole human race, and notifying to the Christian and 
the heathen worlds, with his best compliments, that he 
has hoisted his pocket handkerchief once and forever 
upon that virgin soil ; thenceforward claiming the 
jus dominii to the top of the atmosphere above it, and 10 
also the right of driving shafts to the center of the 
earth below it ; so that all people found after this 
warning either aloft in upper chambers of the atmos- 
phere, or groping in subterraneous shafts, or squat- 
ting audaciously on the surface of the soil, will be 15 
treated as trespassers — kicked, that is to say, or de- 
capitated, as circumstances may suggest, by their very 
faithful servant, the owner of the said pocket hand- 
kerchief. In the present case it is probable that my 
cloak might not have been respected, and the jus 20 
gentium might have been cruelly violated in my per- 
son — for, in the dark, people commit deeds of dark- 
ness, gas being a great ally of morality ; but it so 
happened that on this night there was no other out- 
side passenger ; and thus the crime, which else was 25 
but too probable, missed fire for want of a criminal. 

Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity 
of laudanum, having already traveled two hundred 
and fifty miles — viz., from a point seventy miles 
beyond London. In the taking of laudanum there 30 
was nothing extraordinary. But by accident it drew 
upon me the special attention of my assessor on the 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 9 1 

box, the coachman. And in that also there was noth- 
ing extraordinary. But by accident, and with great 
delight, it drew my own attention to the fact that this 
coachman was a monster in point of bulk, and that he 
5 had but one eye. In fact, he had been foretold by 
Vergil as 

Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum. 

He answered to the conditions in every one of the 
items : i, a monster he was ; 2, dreadful ; 3, shape- 

10 less; 4, huge ; 5, who had lost an eye. But why 
should that delight me ? Had he been one of the 
Calenders in the " Arabian Nights," and had paid down 
his eye as the price of his criminal curiosity, what 
right had / to exult in his misfortune ? I did not 

15 exult ; I delighted in no man's punishment, though it 
were even merited. But these personal distinctions 
(Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) identified in an instant an old 
friend of mine whom I had known in the south for 
some years as the most masterly of mail-coachmen. 

20 He was the man in all Europe that could (if any could) 
have driven six-in-hand full gallop over Al Sirat — that 
dreadful bridge of Mohammed, with no side battle- 
ment's, and of extra room not enough for a razor's 
edge — leading right across the bottomless gulf. 

25 Under this eminent man, whom in Greek I cognomi- 
nated Cyclops Diphrelates (Cyclops the Charioteer), 
I, and others known to me, studied the diphrelatic 
art. Excuse, reader, a word too elegant to be pedan- 
tic. As a pupil, though I paid extra fees, it is to be 

30 lamented that I did not stand high in his esteem. It 
showed his dogged honesty (though, observe, not his 



9 2 DE QUINCE Y. 

discernment) that he could not see my merits. Let 
us excuse his absurdity in this particular by remember- 
ing his want of an eye. Doubtless that made him blind 
to my merits. In the art of conversation, however, he 
admitted that I had the whip-hand of him. On this 5 
present occasion great joy was at our meeting. But 
what was Cyclops doing here ? Had the medical men 
recommended northern air, or how ? I collected, 
from such explanations as he volunteered, that he had 
an interest at stake in some suit at law now pending 10 
at Lancester ; so that probably he had got himself 
transferred to this station for the purpose of connect- 
ing with his professional pursuits an instant readiness 
for the calls of his lawsuit. 

Meantime, what are we stopping for ? Surely we *5 
have now waited long enough. Oh, this procrastinat- 
ing mail, and this procrastinating post office ! Can't 
they take a lesson upon that subject from me ? Some 
people have called me procrastinating. Yet you are 
witness, reader, that I was here kept waiting for the 20 
post office. Will the post office lay its hand on its 
heart, in its moments of sobriety, and assert that ever 
it waited for me ? What are they about ? The guard 
tells me that there is a large extra accumulation of 
foreign mails this night, owing to irregularities caused 25 
by war, by wind, by weather, in the packet service, 
which as yet does not benefit at all by steam. For an 
extra hour, it seems, the post office has been engaged 
in threshing out the pure wheaten correspondence of 
Glasgow, and winnowing it from the chaff of all baser 30 
intermediate towns. But at last all is finished. Sound 
your horn, guard ! Manchester, good-by ! we've 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 93 

lost an hour by your criminal conduct at the post 
office ; which, however, though I do not mean to part 
with a serviceable ground of complaint, and one which 
really is such for the horses, to me secretly is an 
5 advantage, since it compels us to look sharply for this 
lost hour among the next eight or nine, and to recover 
it (if we can) at the rate of one mile extra per hour. 
Off we are at last, and at eleven miles an hour ; and 
for the moment I detect no changes in the energy or 

ioin the skill of Cyclops. 

From Manchester to Kendal, which virtually (though 
not in law) is the capital of Westmoreland, there were 
at this time seven stages of eleven miles each. The 
first five of these, counting from Manchester, terminate 

15 in Lancaster ; which is therefore fifty-five miles north 
of Manchester, and the same distance exactly from 
Liverpool. The first three stages terminate in Preston 
(called by way of distinction from other towns of that 
name, Proud Preston) ; at which place it is that the 

20 separate roads from Liverpool and from Manchester 
to the north become confluent.* Within these first 
three stages lay the foundation, the progress, and 
termination of our night's adventure. During the 
first stage I found out that Cyclops was mortal ; he 

25 was liable to the shocking affection of sleep — a thing 

**' Confluent ." — Suppose a capital Y (the Pythagorean letter): 
Lancaster is at the foot of this letter ; Liverpool at the top of the 
right branch ; Manchester at the top of the left ; Proud Preston 
30 at the center, where the two branches unite. It is thirty-three 
miles along either of the two branches ; it is twenty-two miles 
along the stem — viz., from Preston in the middle to Lancaster at 
the foot. There's a lesson in geography for the reader ! 



94 DE QUINCE Y. 

which previously I had never suspected. If a man 
indulges in the vicious habit of sleeping, all the skill 
in aurigation of Apollo himself, with the horses 
of Aurora to execute his notions, avails him noth- 
ing. " O Cyclops!" I exclaimed, " thou art mortal. 5 
My friend, thou snorest." Through the first eleven 
miles, however, this infirmity — which I grieve to say 
that he shared with the whole Pagan Pantheon — 
betrayed itself only by brief snatches. On waking 
up, he made an apology for himself which, instead of 10 
mending matters, laid open a gloomy vista of coming 
disasters. The summer assizes, he reminded me, were 
now going on at Lancaster ; in consequence of which, 
for three nights and three days he had not lain down 
in a bed. During the day he was waiting for his own 15 
summons as a witness on the trial in which he was 
interested, or else, lest he should be missing at the 
critical moment, was drinking with the other witnesses 
uuder the pastoral surveillance of the attorneys. 
During the night, or that part of it which at sea would 20 
form the middle watch, he was driving. This expla- 
nation certainly accounted for his drowsiness, but in 
a way which made it much more alarming ; since 
now, after several days' resistance to this infirmity, 
at length he was steadily giving way. Throughout 25 
the second stage he grew more and more drowsy. 
In the second mile of the third stage he surrendered 
himself finally, and without a struggle, to his perilous 
temptation. All his past resistance had but deepened 
the weight of this final oppression. Seven atmos- 30 
pheres of sleep rested upon him ; and, to consummate 
the case, our worthy guard, after singing " Love among 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 95 

the Roses " for perhaps thirty times, without invita- 
tion and without applause, had in revenge moodily 
resigned himself to slumber— not so deep, doubtless, 
as the coachman's, but deep enough for mischief. 
5 And thus at last, about ten miles from Preston, it 
came about that I found myself left in charge of his 
majesty's London and Glasgow mail, then running at 
the least twelve miles an hour. 

What made this negligence less criminal than else 
10 it must have been thought was the condition of the 
roads at night during the assizes. At that time, all 
the law business of populous Liverpool, and also of 
populous Manchester, with its vast cincture of popu- 
lous rural districts, was called up by ancient usage to 

15 the tribunal of Lilliputian Lancaster. To break up 
this old traditional usage required, 1, a conflict with 
powerful established interests, 2, a large system of 
new arrangements, and 3, a new parliamentary statute. 
But as yet this change was merely in contemplation. 

20 As things were at present, twice in the year* so vast 
a body of business rolled northward from the south- 
ern quarter of the county that, for a fortnight at least, 
it occupied the severe exertions of two judges in its 
dispatch. The consequence of this was that every 

25 horse available for such a service, along the whole 
line of road, was exhausted in carrying down the 
multitudes of people who were parties to the different 
suits. By sunset, therefore, it usually happened that, 
through utter exhaustion among men and horses, 

30 *" Twice in t/ie year."— There were at that time only two 
assizes even in the most populous counties — viz., the Lent Assizes 
and the Summer Assizes. 



96 DE QUINCE Y. 

the road sank into profound silence. Except the 
exhaustion in the vast adjacent county of York from 
a contested election, no such silence succeeding to no 
such fiery uproar was ever witnessed in England. 

On this occasion the usual silence and solitude 5 
prevailed along the road. Not a hoof nor a wheel 
was to be heard. And, to strengthen this false luxuri- 
ous confidence in the noiseless roads, it happened 
also that the night was one of peculiar solemnity and 
peace. For my own part, though slightly alive to IO 
the possibilities of peril, I had so far yielded to the 
influence of the mighty calm as to sink into a pro- 
found reverie. The month was August ; in the 
middle of which lay my own birthday — a festival to 
every thoughtful man suggesting solemn and often 15 
sigh-born* thoughts. The county was my own native 
county — upon which, in its southern section, more 
than upon any equal area known to man past or 
present, had descended the original curse of labor in 
its heaviest form, not mastering the bodies only of 20 
men, as of slaves, or criminals in mines, but working 
through the fiery will. Upon no equal space of earth 
was, or ever had been, the same energy of human 
power put forth daily. At this particular season 
also of the assizes, that dreadful hurricane of flight 25 
and pursuit, as it might have seemed to a stranger, 
which swept to and from Lancaster all day long, 
hunting the county up and down, and regularly sub- 
siding back into silence about sunset, could not fail 

* "Sigh-born." — I owe the suggestion of this word to an obscure 30 
remembrance of a beautiful phrase in Giraldus Cambrensis — 
viz., suspiricsce cogitationes. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 97 

(when united with this permanent distinction of Lan- 
cashire as the very metropolis and citadel of labor) 
to point the thoughts pathetically upon that counter- 
vision of rest, of saintly repose from strife and sorrow, 
5 towards which, as to their secret haven, the profounder 
aspirations of man's heart are in solitude continually 
traveling. Obliquely upon our left we were nearing 
the sea ; which also must, under the present circum- 
stances, be repeating the general state of halcyon 

10 repose. The sea, the atmosphere, the light, bore 
each an orchestral part in this universal lull. Moon- 
light and the first timid tremblings of the dawn were by 
this time blending ; and the blendings were brought 
into a still more exquisite state of unity by a slight 

15 silvery mist, motionless and dreamy, that covered the 
woods and fields, but with a veil of equable transpar- 
ency. Except the feet of our own horses — which, 
running on a sandy margin of the road, made but 
little disturbance — there was no sound abroad. In 

20 the clouds and on the earth prevailed the same majes- 
tic peace ; and, in spite of all that the villain of a 
schoolmaster has done for the ruin of our sublimer 
thoughts, which are the thoughts of our infancy, we 
still believe in no such nonsense as a limited atmos- 

25 phere. Whatever we may swear with our false feign- 
ing lips, in our faithful hearts we still believe, and 
must forever believe, in fields of air traversing the 
total gulf between earth and the central heavens. 
Still, in the confidence of children that tread without 

30 fear every chamber in their father's house, and to whom 
no door is closed, we, in that Sabbatic vision which 
sometimes is revealed for an hour upon nights like 



98 DE QUINCE Y. 

this, ascend with easy steps from the sorrow-stricken 
fields of earth upward to the sandals of God. 

Suddenly, from thoughts like these I was awakened 
to a sullen sound, as of some motion on the distant 
road. It stole upon the air for a moment ; I listened 5 
in awe ; but then it died away. Once roused, how- 
ever, I could not but observe with alarm the quickened 
motion of our horses. Ten years' experience had made 
my eye learned in the valuing of motion ; and I saw 
that we were now running thirteen miles an hour. 1 10 
pretend to no presence of mind. On the contrary, my 
fear is that I am miserably and shamefully deficient 
in that quality as regards action. The palsy of doubt 
and distraction hangs like some guilty weight of dark 
unfathomed remembrances upon my energies when the 15 
signal is flying for action. But, on the other hand, this 
accursed gift I have, as regards thought, that in the 
first step toward the possibility of a misfortune I see 
its total evolution ; in the radix of the series I see too 
certainly and too instantly its entire expansion ; in the 20 
first syllable of the dreadful sentence I read already 
the last. It was not that I feared for ourselves. Us 
our bulk and impetus charmed against peril in any 
collision. And I had ridden through too many hun- 
dreds of perils that were frightful to approach, that 25 
were matter of laughter to look back upon ; the first 
face of which was horror, the parting face a jest — for 
any anxiety to rest upon our interests. The mail was 
not built, I felt assured, nor bespoke, that could 
betray me who trusted to its protection. But any 30 
carriage that we could meet would be frail and light 
in comparison of ourselves. And I remarked this 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 99 

ominous accident of our situation — we were on the 
wrong side of the road. But then, it may be said, the 
other party, if other there was, might also be on the 
wrong side ; and two wrongs might make a right. 

5 That was not likely. The same motive which had drawn 
us to the right-hand side of the road — viz., the luxury 
of the soft beaten sand as contrasted with the paved 
center — would prove attractive to others. The two 
adverse carriages would, therefore, to a certainty, be 

10 traveling on the same side ; and from this side, as not 
being ours in law, the crossing over to the other would, 
of course, be looked for from us* Our lamps, still 
lighted, would give the impression of vigilance on our 
part. And every creature that met us would rely 

i 5 upon us for quartering.f All this, and if the separate 
links of the anticipation had been a thousand times 
more, I saw, not discursively, or by effort, or by sue 
cession, but by one flash of horrid simultaneous 
intuition. 

20 Under this steady though rapid anticipation of the 
evil which wig/itbe gathering ahead, ah ! what a sullen 
mystery of fear, what a sigh of woe, was that which 
stole upon the air, as again the far-off sound of 
a wheel was heard ! A whisper it was — a whisper 

25 from, perhaps, four miles off — secretly announcing a 

* It is true that, according to the law of the case as established 
by legal precedents, all carriages were required to give way before 
royal equipages, and therefore before the mail as one of them. 
But this only increased the danger, as being a regulation very im- 
30 perfectly made known, very unequally enforced, and therefore 
often embarrassing the movements on both sides. 

f " Quartering." — This is the technical word, and, I presume, 
derived from the French cartayer, to evade a rut or any obstacle. 



100 DE QUINCE y. 

ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less inevitable ; 
that, being known, was not therefore healed. What 
could be done — who was it that could do it — to check 
the storm-flight of these maniacal horses ? Could I not 
seize the reins from the grasp of the slumbering 5 
coachman ? You, reader, think that it would have 
been in your power to do so. And I quarrel not with 
your estimate of yourself. But, from the way in 
which the coachman's hand was viced between his 
upper and lower thigh, this was impossible. Easy, 10 
was it? See, then, that bronze equestrian statue. 
The cruel rider has kept the bit in his horse's mouth 
for two centuries. Unbridle him for a minute, if you 
please, and wash his mouth with water. Easy, was it? 
Unhorse me, then, that imperial rider ; knock me 15 
those marble feet from those marble stirrups of 
Charlemagne. 

The sounds ahead strengthened, and were now too 
clearly the sounds of wheels. Who and what could it 
be ? Was it industry in a taxed cart ? Was it youth- 20 
ful gayety in a gig ? Was it sorrow that loitered, or 
joy that raced ? For as yet the snatches of sound 
were too intermitting, from distance, to decipher the 
character of the motion. Whoever were the travelers, 
something must be done to warn them. Upon the 25 
other party rests the active responsibility, but upon 
us — and, woe is me ! that us was reduced to my frail 
opium-shattered self — rests the responsibility of warn- 
ing. Yet, how should this be accomplished ? Might 
I not sound the guard's horn? Already, on the first 30 
thought, I was making my way over the roof to the 
guard's seat. But this, from the accident which I 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. lot 

have mentioned, of the foreign mails being piled upon 
the roof, was a difficult and even dangerous attempt 
to one cramped by nearly three hundred miles of out- 
side traveling. And, fortunately, before I had lost 
5 much time in the attempt, our frantic horses swept 
round an angle of the road which opened upon us 
that final stage where the collision must be accom- 
plished and the catastrophe sealed. All was appar- 
ently finished. The court was sitting ; the case was 
io heard ; the judge had finished ; and only the verdict 
was yet in arrear. 

Before us lay an avenue straight as an arrow, six 
hundred yards, perhaps, in length ; and the umbra- 
geous trees, which rose in a regular line from either 
i 5 side, meeting high overhead, gave to it the character of 
a cathedral aisle. These trees lent a deeper solemnity 
to the early light ; but there was still light enough to 
perceive, at the further end of this Gothic aisle, a 
frail reedy gig, in which were seated a young man, 
26 and by his side a young lady. Ah, young sir ! what 
are you about ? If it is requisite that you should 
whisper your communications to this young lady, — 
though really I see nobody, at an hour and on a road 
so solitary, likely to overhear you,— is it therefore 
25 requisite that you should carry your lips forward to 
hers ? The little carriage is creeping on at one mile 
an hour ; and the parties within it, being thus ten- 
derly engaged, are naturally bending down their heads. 
Between them and eternity, to all human calculation, 
30 there is but a minute and a half. Oh, Heavens ! what 
is it that I shall do ? Speaking or acting, what help 
can I offer ? Strange it is, and to a mere auditor of 



102 DE QUINCE Y. 

the tale might seem laughable, that I should need a 
suggestion from the Iliad to prompt the sole resource 
that remained. Yet so it was. Suddenly I remem- 
bered the shout of Achilles, and its effect. But could 
I pretend to shout like the son of Peleus, aided by 5 
Pallas? No ; but then I needed not the shout that 
should alarm all Asia militant ; such a shout would 
suffice as might carry terror into the hearts of two 
thoughtless young people and one gig-horse. I 
shouted — and the young man heard me not. A 10 
second time I shouted — and now he heard me, for 
now he raised his head. 

Here, then, all had been done that, by me, could be 
done ; more on my part was not possible. Mine had 
been the first step; the second was for the young 15 
man ; the third was for God. If, said I, this stranger 
is a brave man, and if indeed he loves the young girl 
at his side — or, loving her not, if he feels the obliga- 
tion, pressing upon every man worthy to be called a 
man, of doing his utmost for a woman confided to his 20 
protection — he will at least make some effort to save 
her. If that fails, he will not perish the more, or by a 
death more cruel, for having made it ; and he will die 
as a brave man should, with his face to the danger, 
and with his arm about the woman that he sought in 25 
vain to save. But if he makes no effort — shrinking 
without a struggle from his duty — he himself will not 
the less certainly perish for this baseness of pol- 
troonery. He will die no less ; and why not ? Where- 
fore should we grieve that there is one craven less in 30 
the world ? No ; let him perish, without a pitying 
thought of ours wasted upon him ; and, in that case, 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 103 

all our grief will be reserved for the fate of the help- 
less girl who now, upon the least shadow of failure in 
him, must by the fiercest of translations — must with- 
out time for a prayer — must within seventy seconds — 
5 stand before the judgment-seat of God. 

But craven he was not ; sudden had been the call 
upon him, and sudden was his answer to the call. He 
saw, he heard, he comprehended, the ruin that was 
coming down ; already its gloomy shadow darkened 

10 above him ; and already he was measuring his strength 
to deal with it. Ah! what a vulgar thing does courage 
seem when we see nations buying it and selling it for 
a shilling a day. Ah ! what a sublime thing does 
courage seem when some fearful summons on the 

15 great deep of life carries a man, as if running before a 
hurricane, up to the giddy crest of some tumultuous 
crisis from which lie two courses, and a voice says to 
him audibly, " One way lies hope ; take the other, and 
mourn forever ! " How grand a triumph if, even 

20 then, amidst the raving of all around him, and the 
frenzy of the danger, the man is able to confront his 
situation — is able to retire for a moment into solitude 
with God, and to seek his counsel from him! 

For seven seconds, it might be, of his seventy, the 

25 stranger settled his countenance steadfastly upon us, 
as if to search and value every element in the conflict 
before him. For five seconds more of his seventy he 
sat immovably, like one that mused on some great 
purpose. For five more, perhaps, he sat with eyes 

30 upraised, like one that prayed in sorrow, under some 
extremity of doubt, for light that should guide him to 
the better choice. Then suddenly he rose ; stood 



104 BE QUINCE Y. 

upright ; and, by a powerful strain upon the reins, 
raising his horse's fore feet from the ground, he 
slewed him round on the pivot of his hind legs, so as 
to plant the little equipage in a position nearly at 
right angles to ours.. Thus far his condition was not 5 
improved, except as a first step had been taken 
towards the possibility of a second. If no more were 
done, nothing was done ; for the little carriage still 
occupied the very center of our path, though in an 
altered direction. Yet even now it may not be too 10 
late ; fifteen of the seventy seconds may still be unex- 
hausted ; and one almighty bound may avail to clear 
the ground. Hurry, then, hurry ! for the flying 
moments — they hurry. Oh, hurry, hurry, my brave 
young man ! for the cruel hoofs of our horses — they 15 
also hurry ! Fast are the flying moments, faster are 
the hoofs of our horses. But fear not for him y if 
human energy can suffice ; faithful was he that drove 
to his terrific duty ; faithful was the horse to his com- 
mand. One blow, one impulse given with voice and 20 
hand, by the stranger, one rush from the horse, one 
bound as if in the act of rising to a fence, landed the 
docile creature's fore feet upon the crown or arching 
center of the road. The larger half of the little 
equipage had then cleared our overtowering shadow : 25 
that was evident even to my own agitated sight. But 
it mattered little that one wreck should float off in 
safety, if upon the wreck that perished were embarked 
the human freightage. The rear part of the car- 
riage — was that certainly beyond the line of absolute 30 
ruin ? What power could answer the question ? 
Glance of eye, thought of man, wing of angel, which 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 105 

of these had speed enough to sweep between the 
question and the answer, and divide the one from the 
other? Light does not tread upon the steps of light 
more indivisibly than did our all-conquering arrival 
5 upon the escaping efforts of the gig. That must the 
young man have felt too plainly. His back was now 
turned to us ; not by sight could he any longer com- 
municate with the peril ; but, by the dreadful rattle 
of our harness, too truly had his ear been instructed 

10 that all was finished as regarded any effort of his. 
Already in resignation he had rested from his struggle ; 
and perhaps in his heart he was whispering, " Father, 
which art in heaven, do thou finish above what I on 
earth have attempted." Faster than ever mill-race 

15 we ran past them in our inexorable flight. Oh, raving 
of hurricanes that must have sounded in their young 
ears at the moment of our transit ! Even in that 
moment the thunder of collision spoke aloud. Either 
with the swingle-bar, or with the haunch of our near 

20 leader, we had struck the off-wheel of the little gig ; 
which stood rather obliquely, and not quite so far 
advanced as to be accurately parallel with the near 
wheel. The blow from the fury of our passage 
resounded terrifically. I rose in horror, to gaze upon 

25 the ruins we might have caused. From my elevated 
station I looked down, and looked back upon the 
scene ; which in a moment told its own tale, and wrote 
all its records on my heart forever. 

Here was the map of the passion that now had 

30 finished. The horse was planted immovably, with his 
fore feet upon the paved crest of the central road. 
He of the whole party might be supposed untouched 



106 DE QUINCE Y. 

by the passion of death. The little cany carriage— 
partly, perhaps, from the violent torsion of the wheels 
in its recent movement, partly from the thundering 
blow we had given to it — as if it sympathized with 
human horror, was all alive with tremblings and 5 
shiverings. The young man trembled not, nor 
shivered. He sat like a rock. But his was the steadi- 
ness of agitation frozen into rest by horror. As yet 
he dared not to look round ; for he knew that, if any- 
thing remained to do, by him it could no longer be 10 
done. And as yet he knew not for certain if their 
safety were accomplished. But the lady 

But the lady Oh, Heavens ! will that spectacle 

ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank 
upon her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms 15 
wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in 
the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing ? Figure 
to yourself, reader, the elements of the case ; suffer 
me to recall before your mind the circumstances of 
that unparalleled situation. From the silence and 20 
deep peace of this saintly summer night — from the 
pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, 
dreamlight — from the manly tenderness of this flatter- 
ing, whispering, murmuring love — suddenly as from 
the woods- and fields — suddenly as from the chambers 25 
of the air opening in revelation — suddenly as from 
the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her, with 
the flashing of cataracts, Death the crowned phantom, 
with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar 
of his voice. 30 

The moments were numbered ; the strife was 
finished ; the vision was closed. In the twinkling of 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 1 07 

an eye, our flying horses had carried us to the termina- 
tion of the umbrageous aisle ; at the right angles we 
wheeled into our former direction ; the turn of the 
road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, 
5 ind swept it into my dreams forever. 



Section III — Dream-Fugue : 

FOUNDED ON THE PRECEDING THEME OF SUDDEN 
DEATH. 

Whence the sound 
10 Of instruments, that made melodious chime, 

Was heard, of harp and organ ; and who moved 
Their stops and chords was seen ; his volant touch 
Instinct through all proportions, low and high, 
Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue. 
15 Par. Lost, bk. xi. 

Tumultuosissimamente. 

Passion of sudden death ! that once in youth I read 
and interpiaed by the shadows of thy averted signs !* 
rapture of panic taking the shape (which among 

20 tombs in churches! have seen) of woman bursting her 
sepulchral bonds — of woman's Ionic form bending 
forward from the ruins of her grave with arching foot, 
with eyes upraised, with clasped adoring hands— wait- 
ing, watching, trembling, praying for the trumpet's 

25 call to rise from dust forever ! Ah, vision too fearful 

* "Averted signs."— I read the course and changes of the lady's 
agony in the succession of her involuntary gestures ; but it must 
be remembered that I read all this from the rear, never once catch- 
ing the lady's full face, and even her profile imperfectly. 



108 DE QUINCE Y. 

of shuddering humanity on the brink of almighty 
abysses ! vision that didst start back, that didst reel 
away, like a shriveling scroll from before the wrath of 
fire racing on the wings of the wind ! Epilepsy so 
brief of horror, wherefore is it that thou canst not 
die ? Passing so suddenly into darkness, wherefore 
is it that still thou sheddest thy sad funeral blights 
upon the gorgeous mosaics of dreams ? Fragment of 
music too passionate, heard once, and heard no more, 
what aileth thee, that thy deep rolling chords come up 
at intervals through all the worlds of sleep, and, after 
forty years, have lost no element of horror ? 



I 

Lo, it is summer— almighty summer ! The ever- 
lasting gates of life and summer are thrown open 15 
wide ; and on the ocean, tranquil and verdant as a 
savanna, the unknown lady from the dreadful vision 
and I myself are floating — she upon a fairy pinnace, 
and I upon an English three-decker. Both of us are 
wooing gales of festal happiness within the domain of 20 
our common country, within that ancient watery park, 
within the pathless chase of ocean, where England 
takes her pleasure as a huntress through winter and 
summer, from the rising to the setting sun. Ah, 
what a wilderness of floral beauty was hidden, or was 25 
suddenly revealed, upon the tropic islands through 
which the pinnace moved ! And upon her deck what 
a bevy of human flowers ; young women how lovely, 
young men how noble, that were dancing together, 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 109 

and slowly drifting toward us amid music and in- 
cense, amid blossoms from forests and gorgeous 
corymbi from vintages, amid natural caroling and the 
echoes of sweet girlish laughter. Slowly the pinnace 
5 nears us, gayly she hails us, and silently she disappears 
beneath the shadow of our mighty bows. But then, 
as at some signal from heaven, the music, and the 
carols, and the sweet echoing of girlish laughter — all 
are hushed. What evil has smitten the pinnace, 

10 meeting or overtaking her? Did ruin to our friends 
couch within our own dreadful shadow ? Was our 
shadow the shadow of death ? I looked over the bow 
for an answer, and behold ! the pinnace was dis- 
mantled ; the revel and the revelers were found no 

15 more ; the glory of the vintage was dust, and the 
forests with their beauty were left without a witness 
upon the seas. " But where " — and I turned to our 
crew — " where are the lovely women that danced be- 
neath the awning of flowers and clustering corymbi ? 

20 Whither have fled the noble young men that danced 
with them ? " Answer there was none. But suddenly 
the man at the masthead, whose countenance dark- 
ened with alarm, cried out, " Sail on the weather 
beam ! Down she comes upon us ; in seventy seconds 

2 5 she also will founder." 



II. 

I looked to the weather side, and the summer had 

departed. The sea was rocking, and shaken with 

gathering wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty mists, 

30 which grouped themselves into arches and long 



no DE QUINCE Y. 

cathedral aisles. Down one of these, with the fiery 
pace of a quarrel from a crossbow, ran a frigate right 
athwart our course. " Are they mad ? " some voice 
exclaimed from our deck. " Do they woo their 
ruin ?" But in a moment, as she was close upon us, 5 
some impulse of a heady current or local vortex gave 
a wheeling bias to her course, and off she forged with- 
out a shock. As she ran past us, high aloft among 
the shrouds stood the lady of the pinnace. The deeps 
opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering surges 10 
of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce to catch 
her. But far away she was borne into desert spaces 
of the sea ; while still by sight I followed her, as she 
ran before the howling gale, chased by angry seabirds 
and by maddening billows ; still I saw her, as at the 15 
moment when she ran past us, standing among the 
shrouds, with her white draperies streaming before the 
wind. There she stood, with hair disheveled, one 
hand clutched among the tackling — rising, sinking, 
fluttering, trembling, praying ; there for leagues I saw 20 
her as she stood, raising at intervals one hand to 
heaven, amid the fiery crests of the pursuing waves 
and the raving of the storm ; until at last, upon a 
sound from afar of malicious laughter and mockery, 
all was hidden forever in driving showers ; and after- 25 
ward, but when I know not, nor how 

III. 

Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, 
wailing over the dead that die before the dawn, awak- 
ened me as I slept in a boat moored to some familiar 30 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH III 

shore. The morning twilight even then was breaking; 
and, by the dusky revelations which it spread, I saw a 
girl, adorned with a garland of white roses about her 
head for some great festival, running along the 
5 solitary strand in extremity of haste. Her running 
was the running of panic ; and often she looked back 
as to some dreadful enemy in the rear. But when I 
leaped ashore, and followed on her steps to warn her 
her of a peril in front, alas ! from me she fled as from 

10 another peril, and vainly I shouted to her of quick- 
sands that lay ahead. Faster and faster she ran ; 
round a promontory of rock she wheeled out of sight ; 
in an instant I also wheeled round it, but only to see 
the treacherous sands gathering above her head. 

15 Already her person was buried ; only the fair young 
head and the diadem of white roses around it were 
still visible to the pitying heavens ; and, last of all, 
was visible one white marble arm. I saw by the early 
twilight this fair young head, as it was sinking down 

20 to darkness — saw this marble arm, as it rose above her 
head and her treacherous grave, tossing, faltering, 
rising, clutching, as at some false deceiving hand 
stretched out from the clouds — saw this marble arm 
uttering her dying hope, and then uttering her dying 

25 despair. The head, the diadem, the arm — these all 
had sunk ; at last over these also the cruel quick- 
sand had closed ; and no memorial of the fair 
young girl remained on earth, except my own soli- 
tary tears, and the funeral bells from the desert 

30 seas, that, rising again more softly, sang a requiem 
over the grave of the buried child, and over her 
blighted dawn. 



112 DE QUINCE V. 

I sat, and wept in secret the tears that men have 
ever given to the memory of those that died be- 
fore the dawn, and by treachery of earth, our 
mother. But suddenly the tears and funeral bells 
were hushed by a shout as of many nations, and by 5 
a roar as from some great king's artillery, ad- 
vancing rapidly along the valleys, and heard afar 
by echqes from the mountains. " Hush ! " I said, as 
I bent my ear earthward to listen — " hush ! This 
either is the very anarchy of strife, or else" — and then 10 
I listened more profoundly, and whispered as I 
raised my head — "or else, oh Heavens ! it is victory 
that is final, victory that swallows up all strife." 



IV. 



Immediately, in trance, I was carried over land and 15 
sea to some distant kingdom, and placed upon a 
triumphal car, among companions crowned with laurel. 
The darkness of gathering midnight, brooding over 
all the land, hid from us the mighty crowds that were 
weaving restlessly about ourselves as a center ; we 20 
heard them, but saw them not. Tidings had arrived, 
within an hour, of a grandeur that measured itself 
against centuries ; too full of pathos they were, too 
full of joy, to utter themselves by other language than 
by tears, by restless anthems, and Te Deums reverber- 25 
ated from the choirs and orchestras of earth. These 
tidings we that sat upon the laureled car had it for 
our privilege to publish among all nations. And 
already, by signs audible through the darkness, by 



•■ THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 113 

snortingsand tramplings, our angry horses, that knew 
no fear of fleshly weariness, upbraided us with delay. 
Wherefore was it that we delayed ? We waited for a 
secret word, that should bear witness to the hope of 
5 nations as now accomplished forever. At midnight 
the secret word arrived ; which word was — Waterloo 
and Recovered Christendom / The dreadful word shone 
by its own light ; before us it went ; high above our 
leaders' heads it rode, and spread a golden light over 

10 the paths which we traversed. Every city, at the 
presence of the secret word, threw open the gates. 
The rivers were conscious as we crossed. All the 
forests, as we ran along their margins, shivered in 
homage to the secret word. And the darkness com- 

15 prehended it. 

Two hours after midnight we approached a mighty 
Minster. Its gates, which rose to the clouds, were 
closed. But, when the dreadful word that rode before 
us reached them with its golden light, silently they 

20 moved back upon their hinges ; and at a flying gallop 
our equipage entered the grand aisle of the cathedral. 
Headlong was our pace ; and at every altar, in the 
little chapels and oratories to the right hand and left 
of our course, the lamps, dying or sickening, kindled 

25 anew in sympathy with the secret word that was flying- 
past. Forty leagues we might have run in the cathe- 
dral, and as yet no strength of morning light had 
reached us, when before us we saw the aerial galleries 
of organ and choir. Every pinnacle of the fretwork, 

30 every station of advantage among the traceries, was 
crested by white-robed choristers that sang deliver- 
ance ; that wept no more tears, as once their fathers 



H4 DE QUINCE V. 

had wept ; but at intervals that sang together to the 
generations, saying, 

Chant the deliverer's praise in every tongue, 
and receiving answer from afar, 

Such as once in heaven and earth were sung. 5 

And of their chanting was no end ; of our headlong 
pace was neither pause nor slackening. 

Thus, as we ran like torrents — thus, as we swept 
with bridal rapture over the Campo Santo* of the 
cathedral graves — suddenly we became aware of a 10 
vast necropolis rising upon the far-off horizon — a city 
of sepulchers, built within the saintly cathedral for the 
warrior dead that rested from their feuds on earth. 
Of purple granite was the necropolis ; yet, in the first 
minute, it lay like a purple stain upon the horizon, so 15 
mighty was the distance. In the second minute 
it trembled through many changes, growing into 
terraces and towers of wondrous altitude, so mighty 

*'■' Campo Santo." — It is probable that most of my readers will 
be acquainted with the history of the Campo Santo (or cemetery) 20 
at Pisa, composed of earth brought from Jerusalem from a bed of 
sanctity, as the highest prize which the noble piety of crusaders 
could ask or imagine. To readers who are unacquainted with 
England, or who (being English) are yet unacquainted with the 
cathedral cities of England, it may be right to mention that the 
graves within-side the cathedrals often form a flat pavement over 25 
which carriages and horses might run ; and perhaps a boyish 
remembrance of one particular cathedral, acro-s which I had seen 
passengers walk and burdens carried, as about two centuries back 
they were through the middle of St. Paul's in London, may have 30 
assisted my dream. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH, 1 15 

was the pace. In the third minute already, with 
our dreadful gallop, we were entering its suburbs. 
Vast sarcophagi rose on every side, having towers and 
turrets that, upon the limits of the central aisle, 
5 strode forward with haughty intrusion, that ran back 
with mighty shadows into answering recesses. Every 
sarcophagus showed many bas-reliefs — bas-reliefs of 
battles and of battlefields ; battles from forgotten 
ages, battles from yesterday ; battlefields that, long 

10 since, nature had healed and reconciled to herself 
with the sweet oblivion of flowers ; battlefields that 
were yet angry and crimson with carnage. Where the 
terraces ran, there did we run ; where the towers 
curved, there did we curve. With the flight of 

i 5 swallows our horses swept round every angle. Like 
rivers in flood wheeling round headlands, like hurri- 
canes that ride into the secrets of forests, faster than 
ever light unwove the mazes of darkness, our flying 
equipage carried earthly passions, kindled warrior 

20 instincts, among the dust that lay around us — dust 
oftentimes of our noble fathers that had slept in 
God from Crecy to Trafalgar. And now had we 
reached the last sarcophagus, now were we abreast of 
the last bas-relief, already had we recovered the 

25 arrow-like flight of the illimitable central aisle, when 
coming up this aisle to meet us we beheld afar off a 
female child, that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers. 
The mists which went before her hid the fawns that 
drew her, but could not hide the shells and tropic 

30 flowers with which she played — but could not hide the 
lovely smiles by which she uttered her trust in the 
mighty cathedral, and in the cherubim that looked 



Ii6 DE QUINCE Y. 

down upon her from the mighty shafts of its pillars. 
Face to face she was meeting us ; face to face she 
rode, as if danger there was none. " Oh, baby ! " I 
exclaimed, " shalt thou be the ransom for Waterloo ? 
Must we, that carry tidings of great joy to every 5 
people, be messengers of ruin to thee ! " In horror I 
rose at the thought ; but then also, in horror at the 
thought, rose one that was sculptured on a bas-relief — 
a Dying Trumpeter. Solemnly from the field of 
battle he rose to his feet ; and, unslinging his stony 10 
trumpet, carried it, in his dying anguish, to his stony 
lips — sounding once, and yet once again ; proclama- 
tion that, in thy ears, oh, baby ! spoke from the battle- 
ments of death. Immediately deep shadows fell be- 
tween us, and aboriginal silence. The choir had 15 
ceased to sing. The hoofs of our horses, the dreadful 
rattle of our harness, the groaning of our wheels, 
alarmed the graves no more. By horror the bas-relief 
had been unlocked unto life. By horror we, that 
were so full of life, we men and our horses, with their 20 
fiery fore legs rising in mid air to their everlasting 
gallop, were frozen to abas-relief. Then a third time 
the trumpet sounded ; the seals were taken off all 
pulses ; life, and the frenzy of life, tore into their 
channels again ; again the choir burst forth in sunny 25 
grandeur, as from the muffling of storms and dark- 
ness ; again the thunderings of our horses carried 
temptation into the graves. One cry burst from our 
lips, as the clouds, drawing off from the aisle, showed 
it empty before us — "Whither has the infant fled? 30 
is the young child caught up to God ? " Lo ! afar 
off, in a vast recess, rose three mighty windows to the 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. "7 

clouds ; and on a level with their summits, a height 
insuperable to man, rose an altar of purest alabaster. 
On its eastern face was trembling a crimson glory. 
A glory was it from the reddening dawn that now 

5 streamed through the windows ? Was it from the 
crimson robes of the martyrs painted on the windows ? 
Was it from the bloody bas-reliefs of earth ? There, 
suddenly, within that crimson radiance, rose the 
apparition of a woman's head, and then of a woman's 

10 figure. The child it was — grown up to woman's 
height. Clinging to the horns of the altar, voiceless 
she stood — sinking, rising, raving, despairing ; and 
behind the volume of incense that, night and day 
streamed upward from the altar, dimly was seen the 

x 5 fiery font, and the shadow of that dreadful being 
who should have baptized her with the baptism of 
death. But by her side was kneeling her better 
angel, that hid his face with wings ; that wept and 
pleaded for her ; that prayed when she could not; 

20 that fought with Heaven by tears for her deliverance ; 
which also, as he raised his immortal countenance from 
his wings, I saw, by the glory in his eye, that from 
Heaven he had won at last. 



V. 

25 Then was completed the passion of the mighty 
fugue. The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet 
had but muttered at intervals— gleaming among 
clouds and surges of incense — threw up, as from 
fountains unfathomable, columns of heart- shattering 

30 music. Choir and anti-choir were filling fast with 



Il8 DE QUINCE Y. 

unknown voices. Thou also, Dying Trumpeter, with 
thy love that was victorious, and thy anguish that was 
finishing, didst enter the tumult ; trumpet and echo — 
farewell love, and farewell anguish — rang through the 
dreadful Sanctus. Oh, darkness of the grave ! that : 
from the crimson altar and from the fiery font wert 
visited and searched by the effulgence in the angel's 
eye — were these indeed thy children ? Pomps of life, 
that, from the burials of centuries, rose again to the 
voice of perfect joy, did ye indeed mingle with the IO 
festivals of Death ? Lo ! as I looked back for seventy 
leagues through the mighty cathedral, I saw the quick 
and the dead that sang together to God, together 
that sang to the generations of man. All the hosts of 
jubilation, like armies that ride in pursuit, moved x 5 
with one step. Us, that, with laureled heads, were 
passing from the cathedral, they overtook, and, as 
with a garment, they wrapped us round with thunders 
greater than our own. As brothers we moved 
together ; to the dawn that advanced, to the stars that 2 ° 
fled ; rendering thanks to God in the highest — that, 
having hid his face through one generation behind 
thick clouds of War, once again was ascending, from 
the Campo Santo of Waterloo was ascending, in the 
visions of Peace; rendering thanks for thee, young 25 
girl ! whom having overshadowed with his ineffable 
passion of death, suddenly did God relent, suffered 
thy angel to turn aside his arm, and even in thee, 
sister unknown ! shown to me for a moment only to 
be hidden forever, found an occasion to glorify his3o 
goodness. A thousand times, among the phantoms 
of sleep, have I seen thee entering the gates of the 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 119 

golden dawn, with the secret word riding before thee, 
with the armies of the grave behind thee — seen thee 
sinking, rising, raving, despairing ; a thousand times 
in the worlds of sleep have seen thee followed by 

5 God's angel through storms, through desert seas, 
through the darkness of quicksands, through dreams 
and the dreadful revelations that are in dreams ; 
only that at the last, with one sling of his victorious 
arm, he might snatch thee back from ruin, and might 

io emblazon in thy deliverance the endless resurrection 
of his love ! 



AUTHOR'S POSTSCRIPT. 

"The English Mail Coach." — This little paper, 
according to my original intention, formed part of the 
" Suspiria de Profundis"; from which, for a momen- 
tary purpose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to 5 
publish it apart, as sufficiently intelligible even when 
dislocated from its place in a larger whole. To my 
surprise, however, one or two critics, not carelessly in 
conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their 
inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to 10 
follow the links of the connection between its several 
parts. I am myself as little able to understand where 
the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking obscurity, 
as these critics found themselves to unravel my logic. 
Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge 15 
in such a case. I will therefore sketch a brief ab- 
stract of the little paper according to my original de- 
sign, and then leave the reader to judge how far this 
design is kept in sight through the actual execution. 

Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident 20 
made me, in the dead of night, and of a night memo- 
rably solemn, the solitary witness of an appalling scene, 
which threatened instant death in a shape the most 
terrific to two young people whom I had no means of 
assisting, except in so far as I was able to give them 25 
a most hurried warning of their danger ; but even that 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 121 

not until they stood within the very shadow of the 
catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of 
deaths by scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy 
seconds. 
5 Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which 
the whole of this paper radiates as a natural expan- 
sion. This scene is circumstantially narrated in Sec- 
tion the Second, entitled " The Vision of Sudden 
Death." 

10 But a movement of horror, and of spontaneous re- 
coil from this dreadful scene, naturally carried the 
whole of that scene, raised and idealized, into my 
dreams," and very soon into a rolling succession of 
dreams. The actual scene, as looked down upon 

15 from the box of the mail, was transformed into a 
dream, as tumultuous and changing as a musical 
fugue. This troubled dream is circumstantially re- 
ported in Section the Third, entitled " Dream-Fugue 
on the theme of Sudden Death." What I had beheld 

20 from my seat upon the mail — the scenical strife of 
action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there 
witnessed them moving in ghostly silence — this duel 
between life and death, narrowing itself to a point of 
such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared ; all 

25 these elements of the scene blended, under the law of 
association, with the previous and permanent features 
of distinction investing the mail itself ; which features 
at that time lay — 1st, in velocity unprecedented, 2d, in 
the power and beauty of the horses, 3d, in the official 

30 connection with the government of a great nation, 
and, 4th, in the function, almost a consecrated 
function, of publishing and diffusing through the land 



122 BE QUINCE Y. 

the great political events, and especially the great 
battles, during a conflict of unparalleled grandeur. 
These honorary distinctions are all described circum- 
stantially in the First or introductory Section (" The 
Glory of Motion." ) The three first were distinctions 5 
maintained at all times ; but the fourth and grandest 
belonged exclusively to the war with Napoleon ; and 
this it was which most naturally introduced Waterloo 
into the dream. Waterloo, I understand, was the par- 
ticular feature of the " Dream-Fugue " which my 10 
censors were least able to account for. Yet surely 
Waterloo, which, in common with every other great 
battle, it had been our special privilege to publish 
over all the land, most naturally entered the dream 
under the license of our privilege. If not — if there 15 
be anything amiss — let the Dream be responsible. 
Ihe Dream is a law to itself ; and as well quarrel 
with a rainbow for showing, or for not showing, a 
secondary arch. So far as I know, every element in 
the shifting movements of the Dream derived itself 20 
either primarily from the incidents of the actual scene, 
or from secondary features associated with the mail. 
For example, the cathedral aisle derived itself from 
the mimic combination of features which grouped 
themselves together at the point of approaching 25 
collision — viz., an arrowlike section of the road, six 
hundred yards long, under the solemn lights de- 
scribed, with lofty trees meeting overhead in arches. 
The guard's horn, again, — a humble instrument in it- 
self, — was yet glorified as the organ of publication for 30 
so many great national events. And the incident of 
the Dying Trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas-re- 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 123 

lief, and carries a marble trumpet to his marble lips 
foi the purpose of warning the female infant, was 
doubtless secretly suggested by my own imperfect 
effort to seize the guard's horn and to blow a warn- 
5 tng blast. But the Dream knows best ; and the 
Dream, I say again, is the responsible party. 



THE END. 



NOTES. 



The text of both pieces here printed follows that of the latest 
Edinburgh edition. The footnotes are by De Quincey himself. 

JOAN OF ARC. 
(Composed early in 1847 ; see p. 17 : 14.) 

The literature on this much vexed question is already extensive 
and is still growing. See Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire Uni- 
versel du XIXe Steele, sub Dare, Jeanne. In imaginative litera- 
ture the best known pieces are, for English : Southey's Joan of 
Arc and Vision of the Maid of Orleans; for German, Schiller's 
Jungfrau von Orleans; for French, Voltaire's La Pucelle. The 
Maid appears also in 1 Henry VI.; it is impossible to believe 
that Act I. scene 2, and Act V. scenes 3 and 4 are by Shakspere. 
Of Southey, Schiller, and Voltaire it may be safely asserted, once 
for all, that their conception of the Maid is unworthy of them- 
selves and of her ; as treated by them, she is an historic and 
artistic impossibility. De Quincey is the first imaginative writer 
to portray the Maid in the true light. His article, published in 
Tait's Magazine, March and August, 1847, is a spontaneous 
effusion, inspired by perusal of Michelet's History. It begins 
with the abruptness of an epic poem. In the Revue des Deux 
Mondes, February 15, 1893, is an article by the Count G. de 
Contades, entitled La Jeanne d 'Arc de Thomas de Quincey, which 
may be useful for introducing the English essayist to the French 
public, but which adds nothing to our knowledge. The Count 
has a low opinion of English humor : Englishmen, unfortu- 
nately, are " heavy in their badinage, rude and sometimes sinister 
in their jesting." Poor De. Quincey ! 

125 



126 NOTES. 

No attempt is made in the present volume to give the real his- 
tory of the Maid and her times ; the subject is too difficult and 
complicated for anything but a special historical monograph. 
Only such explanations are given here as seemed necessary to 
make the ordinary reader feel the full significance of De Quincey's 
allusions. 

2:5, act. Compare : Im Anfang war die That, Faust, 1237. 
— 10. Station of good will. De Quincey seems to use station here 
in the surveyor's sense, " the place selected for planting the instru- 
ment with which an observation is to be made," Cent. Diet. 70. — 
17, scepter . . . Judah. See Gen. xlix. 10. — 23. Vaucouleurs. 
In view of the spelling Vaucouleur, adopted by Southey and 
others, it may not be amiss to state that the s is an organic part of 
the P'rench form. The Latin is oppidujji de Vallecoloris, see 
Quicherat, Proces, etc., i. 53 and passim. 

3:7, even yet may happen. De Quincey believes that Joan may 
yet be exalted to the rank of a national heroine and perhaps even 
canonized. The first has been almost, if not quite, accomplished ; 
as to the second, present indications all point that way. The 
character of Joan was vindicated centuries ago ; by decree, July 7, 
1456, of a papal commission under the presidency of the arch- 
bishop of Reims, the sentence pronounced and executed upon 
Joan was reversed and her memory exonerated from all taint of 
heresy. 

4:9, wither them. Allusion to the Revolution of 1789, in 
consequence of which the jleur de lis ceased to be the national 
emblem. — 25, recovered liberty. Allusion to the Revolution of 
July, 1830, which expelled the restored Bourbons. De Quincey 
is writing just before the Revolution of 1848, the mutterings of 
which were already audible. 

5:5, Michelet. Born 1798, died 1874. See Larousse. In 
1838 was appointed professor of history and ethics in the College 
de France. In his lectures, which were very popular, he attacked 
savagely the Jesuits. The substance of the lectures appeared in 
book form as follows : Des Je'suites, 1843 ; Du Pritre, de la 
Femme, et de la Famille, 1844 ; Du Peuple, 1 845. In 1847 he 
was suspended from lecturing, by order of the Orleanist govern- 



JOAN- OF ARC. 127 

ment. The revolutionary government of 1848 offered to restore 
him to his functions, but he declined the offer, preferring inde- 
pendent authorship. His Histoire de France, in six volumes, 
appeared 1835-1844. The part relating to Joan is in Vol. V., 
published 1841. — 28, Chevy Chase. The early version of the lines, 
here parodied runs in Bishop Percy's folio : 

the stout Erie of Northumberland 

a vow to God did make, 
his pleasure in the Scottish woods 

3 som;«ers days to take. 

See edition by Hales and Furnivall, II., p. 7. 

6 : 30, note. Refers to Quicherat, Proces de Condamnation et de 
Rehabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc, 1841-49. Five volumes, com- 
plete and indexed. 

7:18, Delenda est, etc. Imitated by De Quincey after the 
maxim of Cato the Elder : Delenda est Carthago, with which he 
is said to have concluded every speech of his in the Roman 
Senate. 

8 : 1, Suffren. In the Boston edition of De Quincey the name 
is misspelled Suffrein. Pierre Andre de Suffren, 1726-88, was 
a conspicuous figure in the naval contest between France and 
England. His chief exploits were in the East Indies. According 
to Doniel, Histoire de la Participation de la France a V Etablisse- 
ment des Flats Unis, IV. 558, note 1, Suffren was in De Grasse's 
fleet when it left Brest for Yorktown, 1781, but off the Azores 
was detached with five vessels on an expedition against the 
Cape of Good Hope. He was thus very nearly a participant in 
the siege that led to the surrender of Cornwallis. — 7. magnani- 
mous. The treatment of Joan in Henry VI. is anything but 
magnanimous. 

12 : 24, Papal interdicts. De Quincey has probably in mind 
such an interdict as that pronounced in 1200, by Innocent III., 
against France. All ecclesiastical functions were suspended and 
the land was in desolation. See Hart, German Universities, 
p. 210. — 24, tragedies, etc. The Emperor is Konradin, the last 
of the Hohenstaufen, beheaded by Charles of Anjou at Naples, 
1268. The subsequent cruelties of Charles in Sicily caused 



128 NOTES. 

the popular uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers, 1282, in 
which many thousands of Frenchmen were assassinated. — 
28, flight from earth. The battle of Cre'cy, in which the 
English archers (yeomen or plebeians) were completely victorious 
over the French horsemen (knights and squires), is usually taken 
to be the beginning of the downfall of mediaeval feudalism and its 
peculiar military system. 

13 : 1, double Pope. The great "schism of the West," during 
which the rival Popes at Avignon and Rome fought each other 
with pen and sword, lasted about forty years. At one time, in 
fact, there were three claimants to the tiara. Peace was at last 
established in 141 7, with the installation of Martin V. in the 
Vatican. See Student's Gibbon, ch. xxxix, £^ iS, 19. — 5, rents 
which no man should ever heal, i. e., Lutheran or Protestant 
Reformation of the sixteenth century. De Quincey means that 
all the disturbances in the mediaeval church were only a preparation 
for the final disruption effected by Luther. 

1 5 '• l 5- The Vosges, in German Vogesen t were again the scene 
of terrible fighting in the Franco-German war of 1870. 

16 : 13. 1 >e Quincey's memory is here at fault ; the remark is 
not made by Sir Roger but to him. In the paper called Sit 

at the Assizes, at the end, Sir Roger a>ks his friend's opinion of a 
tavern sign, originally his (Sir Roger's) face, but now altered into 
a Saracen's head, whether it is more like him or the Saracen, to 
which the friend replies: "That much might be said on both 
sides." 

17: 10, Bergeteta. Very lace Latin, coined from the French 
bergerette, shepherdess. — 20-30. The practice of yoking women 
with animals for field-work is still in vogue on the Continent. 
The flogging (of the women) is perhaps mythical. 

18: 19, Friday. The attendant of Robinson Crusoe. 

19: 1-5, as-tn donne* au cochon a manger t I hue you fed the 
pig; as-ln saiti'e les fleurs-de-lys, Have you saved the kingdom ; 
see 4 : 9,. and note. 

20 : 3, So ut hey s Joan. The poem was the very crude perform- 
ance of Southey's youth. For a fuller statement of De Quincey's 
estimate of it, see his paper on Charles Lamb, new Edinburgh 
ed., V. 238-242. — 21, f>rieks for sheriff. " The Lord Lieu- 



JOAN OF ARC. 129 

tenant [of the county] prepares a list of persons qualified to serve, 
and returns three names. . . The list is then sent to the sover- 
eign, who, without looking at it, strikes a bodkin among the 
names, and he whose name is pierced is elected," Cent. Diet. 
De Quincey must be wrong in saying that the sovereign "pricks 
for two men out of three." There is only one sheriff for a county. 
— 25, Lady of the Orient. The additional title Empress of India 
was assumed by Victoria in 1S76 ; she was proclaimed such at 
Delhi, January 1, 1877. 

21 : 15, tin pen fort, going too far, coming it rather strong. 
— 18-20, dauphin . . . no crown. At the death of Charles 
VI. (see p. 12 : 4) in 1422, his son was proclaimed his suc- 
cessor, as Charles VII. But the English declared him illegiti- 
mate and contested his claim, setting up the infant Henry 
VI. Being in possession of the greater part of Northern 
France, they prevented the consecration of Charles VII. at 
Reims, then regarded as an essential feature of the royal suc- 
cession. 

22:i, the English boy. At this time (1429) Henry VI. was 
only in his ninth year. — 4, ovens of Rheiins. The city is well 
known for its cake bakeries. But De Quincey seems to have 
in mind a French popular saying ; it has not been traced. — 
18, Matthew Tindal, one of the English deists, 1656-1733. 
His Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republi- 
cation of the Religion of Nature, was published 1730. — 22, 
Joseph Cottle, bookseller and publisher of Bristol. A friend 
and admirer of Southey and Coleridge in their youth. He wrote 
also some poetry ; but his best known work is his Reminiscences 
of Coleridge and Southey, 1847. 

23:11-20, Par. Reg., i. 196-205. — 26, France Delivered. 
Imitated by De Quincey from the title of Tasso's poem, Jerusalem 
Delivered. 

25:12, excepting one man. This is ambiguous. If De Quincey 
refers to Joan's first appearance before the Dauphin at Chinon 
(p. 20 : 10), her steadfast supporter was the Due d'Alencon 
(Michelet, V. 63) ; if he refers to the march from Orleans to 
Patay, Troyes, and Reims, the president of the council, Macon, 
seems to be the man (Michelet, V. 87). In popular accounts 



*3° NOTES. 

Dunois, the Bastard, is her stanchest admirer. Schiller represents 
him in love with her. See Jtmgfrau, Act IV. scene 12. 

27 : 4, Nolebat uti t etc. , she was loath to use her sword or slay 
anyone. 

28: 15, Bishop that art, etc. De Quincey is here echoing the 
prophecy of the witches to Macbeth, Act I. scene 3, and Lady 
Macbeth's soliloquy, Act I. scene 5. For fuller account of 
Bishop of Beauvais see note to pp. 43-45. — 18, triple crown, the 
pope's tiara. 

29 : 5. Criminal procedure in France is still open to the charges 
here brought against it. It may be said to act upon the theory 
that the accused must prove his innocence. — 29. Dominican. 
The prosecution was conducted by two of this monastic order : 
Jean Le Maitre, prior of the convent of St. James, in Rouen, and 
Jean Graverent, Grand Inquisitor of France. Which of the two 
De Quincey means is not clear. Nor will any one of the interrog- 
atories in the full text of Quicherat, or in Michelet's summary, 
answer to De Quincey 's " objection." Again his memory seems 
to have played him false. 

32 : 20. See Ezekiel xxxvii. 1-10. 

33 : 25, daughter of Casars. Marie Antoinette was the daughter 
of the German emperor, Francis I. The official title of the (old) 
empire was The Holy Roman Empire of Germany, resting upon 
the political fiction of a transfer of the empire from the ancient 
Romans to the Germans in the person of Charlemagne, and its 
transmission through his German successors, until its dissolution, 
in 1806, by Napoleon. 

35 : 24, Judaic, Satanic. English poetry, indeed English litera- 
ture in general, from its frequent Old Testament allusions and 
sentiments, has been called Judaic by more than one Continental 
critic. The epithet Satanic was applied by Southey, in the 
preface to his Vision of Judgment, 182 1, to the younger set of 
writers then prominent. No names were mentioned, but it was 
generally known that the thrust was aimed at Byron, Leigh Hunt, 
Shelley, etc. 

36 : 27. The question of the authorship of the Imitation of 
Christ is still in dispute. 

38 : 27, burgoo. A thick oatmeal gruel or porridge used chiefly 



JOAN OF ARC. 131 

by seamen. The Phil. Diet, adds " derivation unknown." 
According to London A then., October 6, 1888, the word is a cor- 
ruption of Arabic burghul, see Dozy, Suppl. anx Diet. Arabes, 

I. 73, 74- 

39 : 4, personal rancor. De Quincey's estimate is not perfectly 
true. In the Neronian persecution certainly the Christians were 
treated as miserable outcasts, the personal enemies of the gods, 
the emperor, and the commonwealth. Nero tried to fasten upon 
them the responsibility for the burning of Rome. — 13, qui ne se 
rendent pas. See note to p. 59 : 31. — 34. Michelet's History of 
France, translated by Walter K. Kelly ; London, Chapman & 
Hall ; 2 vols., 1844-46. 

42 : 13, rise from the dead. See Lnke, xvi. 31. 

42 : 15, 44 : 14 (see also p. 28 : 15). Pierre Cauchon, Bishop 
of Beauvais and Rector of the University of Paris. Appropriately 
called by Quicherat I'dme damne'e des princes de Lancastre. 
Made bishop of Beauvais in 1420. Expelled from his bishopric 
in 1429, by the people, as a traitor, he followed the fortunes of 
the English party, with the promise from them of being made 
Archbishop of Reims. But the promise was never kept. When 
Joan was captured at Compiegne, he claimed jurisdiction over 
her, that town being in the Beauvais diocese. As presiding judge 
he resorted to every means, however infamous, for securing her 
condemnation. After his death, 1442 or 1443, the people dug up 
his remains and threw them in the public sewer. De Quincey 
represents him as dying in bed, 42 : 15, haunted with the vision 
of his victim. This is not historical. According to Quicherat, 
iii. 165, he died suddenly while getting shaved: "mortuus est 
subito, faciendo fieri barbam suam." — 25, English Prince, 
Regent. John, Duke of Bedford, brother of Henry V., and 
leader of the English interests in France. — 26, Lord of IVm- 
chester. Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester, half-brother of 
Henry IV. Made cardinal in 1426. The most active and in- 
fluential English prelate of his day. Member of the court that 
tried Joan. For the story that he " died and made no sign " see 
2 Henry VI, Act III. scene 3, end. It is in the old chronicles, 
but is not supported by contemporary evidence. 

45: 16, see Isaiah lxiii. 1. Exactly what De Quincey means 



132 MoteS. • 

by " bloody coronation robes from Rheims" is not as clear as one 
might wish. There seems to be a tacit assumption on the part of 
all modern writers that Joan appeared in armor at the consecration 
of Charles VII. at Reims ; if she did, this armor may very well 
have been stained with blood, for there was hard fighting at the 
capture of Troyes, only a week before. But there is no contem- 
porary mention of Joan's habiliments at the consecration ; the 
only point certain is that during the ceremony she held her 
famous standard. At her execution at Rouen she was dressed in 
female attire, Michelet, V. 167. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 

(In revising the original Blackwood articles for the Edinburgh 
edition, 1854, the author made many changes. For a full account 
of them the reader must consult the new Masson edition, XIII. 
270-330. The present text follows Professor Masson's, omitting, 
however, his notes). 

r. Glory of Motion. 

46 : 20. Professor Masson corrects this statement. Lady Made- 
lina Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Gordon, was first married 
to Sir Robert Sinclair, subsequently to Mr. Charles Palmer, not 
to Mr. John Palmer of mail-coach renown. — 24. The inventio 
sancta crucis, or finding by the Empress Helena, mother of 
Constantine the Great, of the true cross in Jerusalem upon which 
Christ suffered, is a celebrated church legend. See Smith, Dic- 
tionary of Christian Antiquities, I. 504. The calendar day for 
the Western Church is now May 3. 

48 : 20. De Quincey's language is, to say the least, provoking. 
If by college he means dormitory or the like, the universities of the 
Continent, and also of Scotland, have none. In fact " college," 
in the Anglo-American sense, is scarcely known save in England 
proper and America. — 26. According to the Cent. Diet., sub 
Terms, the four periods of the college year at Oxford are now 
Michaelmas, Hilary, Easter, and Trinity. De Quincey seems to 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. i$3 

use Lent= Hilary. Trinity was formerly called Act, because of the 
act or thesis submitted for a degree ; see Phil. Diet, sub Act, 8. 

49 : 32, Pariahs. A favorite word with De Quincey from 
childhood ; see Masson, Life, ch. i. 

50 : 32. In full : de non apparentibus et non existentibus 
eadem est lex. 

51 : 29. In the strikes of those days the workmen who accepted 
lower wages were called snobs; those who held out for higher, 
nobs. 

£2 : 12, attics, garrets. This use of plural form with singular 
meaning is not common in England. At least no example is 
given in Phil. Diet., sub attic, nor in Cent. Diet., sub garret. It 
is heard occasionally in the United States. — 18, Great wits jump. 
Probably used in the Shaksperean sense of " agree, coincide," e. g., 
" both our inventions meet and jump in one," Taming of Shrew, 
Act I. scene 1, 195 ; " they jump not on a just account," Othello, 
Act I. scene 3, 5, i. e., the reports of the Turkish fleet do not 
agree in the number of ships. — 19. The point of the irony lies in 
the circumstance that one of the names for China is Tien Chan, 
Heavenly Dynasty, usually translated Celestial Empire. 

53 : 9» fi rs * ? or d °f th e treasury. In England, the Prime 
Minister. De Quincey's application of the title to Chinese affairs 
is burlesque. — 27, jury-reins. Coined by De Quincey in imitation 
of jury-mast, a temporary mast, in place of the regular mast that 
has been carried away or broken. According to Skeat's letter of 
March 8, 1884 (in London Academy) jury is for ajury, from 
Anglo-French ajuere=\ J $X\n adjuvare " to aid." A jury-mast is 
thus an aid-mast, an adjutory mast. 

54 : 8, ca ira. The burden of a French song extremely popular 
in the Revolution of 1789. According to Larousse, Grand Diet., 
etc., it originated probably in 1790, author unknown, and was at 
first merely a popular theme and air expressive of hope and exulta- 
tion in the new freedom. Later, in the struggle between the 
Jacobins and the adherents of royalty, it was accentuated by the 
terrible refrain : Les aristocrates a la lanterne ! Les aristocrates 
on les pendra ! 

55 • J 8, noters. Since noters and protesters are coupled together 
as persons who make the debtor's life miserable, the word cannot 



134 NOTES. 

mean the maker of a promissory note. Can it be for noterer, an 
archaic form of notary ? 

56 : 4, parliamentary rat. Epithet applied to one who goes 
over to the other party. 

57:16, sEneid, ii, 312. 

58 : 15, qnarterings. See 99 : 15, note. — 21, benefit of clergy. 
"Originally the privilege of exemption from trial by a secular 
court, allowed to, or claimed by, clergymen arraigned for felony ; 
in later times the privilege of exemption from the sentence, which, 
in the case of certain offenses, might be pleaded on his first con- 
viction, by everyone who could read. Abolished ... in 1827. 
The ability to read, being originally merely the test of the 
'clergy,' or clerical position, came at length to be in itself the 
ground of the privilege." Phil. Diet., sub clergy, 6. As a term 
of ordinary literature, a felony "without benefit of clergy " means 
practically a criminal charge for which the offender must stand his 
trial, and — if convicted — his punishment. 

59 : 31. The legendary answer made by Cambronne, commander 
of the Old Guard, when summoned to surrender. The real answer 
is given by Victor Hugo in Les Mistfrables. The legend of the 
Vengeur is that the crew refused to surrender in the fight off 
Ushant, June I, 1794, and fired a last broadside, sinking with the 
shout, Vive la Rdpnblique. In fact the ship sank while the crew 
were crying for help. 

60:23. See "false, fleeting, perjured Clarence," Richard 
III., Act I. scene 4, 55. 

61 : 13. See " Besides the King's name is a tower of strength, 
Which they upon the adverse party want," Richard III., Act V. 
scene 3, 12. 

62:8, omrahs. An Anglo-Indian term, from Arabic omara, 
pi. of amir (ameer), a Mohammedan court-grandee. The // is a 
clumsy attempt to represent the long a vowel ; while the s is the 
addition of an English plural sign to a word that is already plural, 
like banditties for Ital. bandit?', pi. of bandito. — 31, Roman Pearl 
"An imitation pearl made of a ball of alabaster or similar 
mineral substance, upon which is spread pure white wax, which 
in its turn is coated with oriental-pearl essence," Cent. Diet., sub 
pearl, 14. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 135 

63 : 1. De Quincey is making fun of the Welsh obtuseness to 
a joke. Coaches in Plantagenet England were as unknown as 
snakes in Iceland, 56 : 3. Also making fun of the reader, who is 
not supposed to know that the Statute 6 Edward I. has only- 
fifteen chapters ! 

64 : 12, Nile, i. e., the battle of the Nile (or Bay of Aboukir), 
Nelson's victory, August 1, 179S. — 28, Pot-walloping. " The 
sound made by a pot in boiling," Cent. Diet. 

66 : 14. For the slaying of the wooers of Penelope see Odyssey, 
xxii. 

67:14. See "But all our praises why should lords engross, 
Rise, honest Muse ! and sing the Man of Ross," Pope, Epistle 
on Use of Riches, 249. 

68 : 26, Turrets. De Quincey probably has in mind the 
"torets fyled rounde " of the Knight's Tale, 1294. If the word 
is indeed the same, it has changed its meaning. The Chaucerian 
term is applied to a dog's collar, not to the trappings of a horse, 
and means an eye in which a ring will turn round. In Eliza- 
bethan English it meant an amulet or little ring by which a hawk's 
lure was fastened to the jesses. Skeat's note on Knighfs Tale, 
1294. 

69 : 32, Sindbad (Es Sindibad). See The Thousand and One 
Nights, translated by E. W. Lane. 3 Vols., London ; 1865. 
Vol. III. ch. xx. The "old scoundrel" is the Old Man of the 
Sea, who rides Sindbad nearly to death. At last Sindbad makes 
him drunk with wine, the Old Man falls off to the ground, and 
Sindbad breaks his skull with a stone. 

71 ': 24, down from London. Englishmen invariably speak of 
the direction away from London as going down into the country ; 
the reverse is going up to London. 

73 : 17, attelage, team of horses. 

75 : 30, American writer. The name is not ascertainable, 
apparently. It is quite possible that the writer in question may 
have indulged in some harmless ridicule of English brag, and that 
De Quincey has taken him too seriously. 

76 : 26, Columbian standards. Perhaps a covert sneer, imply- 
ing that America is not much more civilized now than when 
discovered by Columbus. 



I3 6 NOTES. 

80 : 7, fey. De Quincey implies that the word is Celtic. This 
is not correct ; it is a genuine English word, Anglo-Saxon fage, 
doomed, fated. 

2. The Vision of Sudden Death. 

Bearing in mind De Quincey's mention of laudanum, 90 : 28, 
one is tempted to speculate upon the ratio of fact to fiction in the 
following narrative. The incident is of course possible. But it 
would be hard to draw a clear dividing line between this Vision 
and the Dream-Fugue. 

85 : 29, fiiadavaros. De Quincey has evidently taken this from 
John Donne's treatise : BIAGANATOS, A Declaration of that 
Paradoxe or Thesis, That Self- homicide is not so naturally Sin, 
that it may never be otherwise, 1644. See his paper on Suicide, etc. , 
Masson's ed. VIII. 398. But not even Donne's precedent justifies 
the word-formation. The only acknowledged compounds are 
fiiaiodavacta, " violent death," and fiiaioQavaroq , " dying a violent 
death." Even (3ta davarog, " death by violence," is not classical. 

88: 21, Nature . . sighing, Paradise Lost, IX. 782. 

89 : 14, down mail. See p. 71 : 24 note. — 28. The date sug- 
gested by 89 : 6 is vague ; the summer in question may be 18 17 
or 1818. De Quincey was married in the end of 1816. 

90: 28, laudanum. De Quincey was at his worst from the 
middle of 1817 to the middle of 1819 ; see Masson's Life, ch. vi. — 
30, beyond London, i. e., to the south of London. Which one of 
De Quincey's numerous southern flittings is here meant is hardly 
possible now to determine. 

91 : 7. See Aineid, III. 658. The monster is Polyphemus. — 
12, Calender. " Also Kalender. Persian qalandar, of unknown 
origin One of a mendicant order of dervishes in Turkey and 
Persia," Phil. Diet. For the story of the Three Calenders 
(mendicants), with shaven chins, each blind of the left eye, see 
Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, I. ch. 3, and note 24. — 
21, A I Sir at, "the bridge over which all must pass on the day 
of judgment, extending over the midst of Hell, finer than a hair 
and sharper than a sword," Lane, The Thousand and One 
Nights, II., ch. 15, note 41. The tradition is not in the Koran. — 
27, 28, After the phrase "too elegant to be pedantic," the. 



THE ENGLISH MAIL COACH. 137 

original article in Blackwood added : ' ' And also take this remark 
from me as a gage d' ami tie — that no word ever was or can be 
pedantic which, by supporting a distinction, supports the accuracy 
of logic, or which fills up a chasm for the understanding." See 
Introduction, p. xxiii. 

94 : 30, seven atmospheres of sleep. De Quincey is indulging 
in jocular arithmetic. The three nights plus the three days, 
94 : 14, plus the present night equal seven. 

99 : 2, 6. De Quincey, it will be observed, speaks of the right 
side of the road as the wrong. In England the law is to drive to 
the left. — 15, quartering. Used also 58 : 15. 

100 : 20, taxed cart. Now usually tax-cart. A little spring- 
cart. "Vehicles not over the value of ^21, formerly termed 
taxed carts, and, since their exemption from tax, usually called in 
the provinces tax-carts," Cent. Diet. Not the heavy American 
cart, for hauling earth, etc., but a light open two-wheeled 
vehicle for driving, similar to the present dog-cart. 

102:4, shout of Achilles. See Iliad, XVIII, 228 [Achilles is 
standing on the wall of the Greek camp] : ' ' Thrice great Achilles 
spake, And thrice (in heat of all the charge) the Trojans started 
back. Twelve men, of greatest strength in Troy, left with their 
lives exhaled. Their chariots and their darts, to death with his 
three summons called." Chapman's translation. 

103 : 13, shilling a day, i. e., the pay of a private soldier. 

3. Dream- Fugue. 

107:15, Par. Lost, IX. 558-563. — 21, woman's Ionic form. 
An allusion to the old story of the origin of the styles of Greek 
architecture, as told by Vitruvius, IV. ch. 1: "They measured 
a man's foot, and finding its length the sixth part of his height, 
they gave the column a similar proportion, that is, they made its 
height six times the thickness of the shaft measured at the base. 
Thus the Doric order obtained its proportion, its strength, and its 
beauty, from the human figure. With a similar feeling they after- 
ward built the temple of Diana. But in that, seeking a new 
proportion, they used the female figure as a standard ; and for the 
purpose of producing a more lofty effect, they first made it eight 
times its thickness in height. Under it they placed a base, after 



/ 1 yf.\r 

138 NOTES. 

the manner of a shoe to the foot ; they also added volutes to its 
capital, like graceful curling hair hanging on each side, and the 
front they ornamented with cytnatia and festoons in the place of 
hair. On the shafts they sunk channels, which bear a resemblance 
to the folds of a matronal garment. Thus two orders were 
invented, one of a masculine character, without ornament, the 
other bearing a character which resembled the delicacy, ornament, 
and proportion of a female. The successors of these people, 
improving in taste, and preferring a more slender proportion, 
assigned seven diameters to the height of the Doric column, and 
eight and a half to the Ionic." Gwilt's translation. 

113 : 14. " And the light shineth in darkness and the darkness 
comprehended it not." John i. 5. — 30, station of advantage. 
Compare "coign of vantage," Macbeth, Act I. scene 6, 7. De 
Quincey probably uses advantage here in an obsolete sense — rising 
ground, commanding position. See Phil. Diet., advantage, 3. 

author's postscript. 
This is the heading introduced by Professor Masson, who says : 
"What is now printed properly as a ' Postscript ' was printed by 
De Quincey himself as a portion of the Preface which he prefixed 
in 1854 to the volume of his Collected Writings containing The 
English Mail Coach." In the Edinburgh ed. of 1862 it is found 
pp. xii-xiv of Vol. VI. 



LRB S '21 



